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Southwest Airlines’ Successful Economistic, Cost-Leadership Strategy Examined In Light Of Paul Lawrence’S Renewed Darwinian Theory: An Analysis, Nadya Chishty-Mujahid

Journal of Global Business Insights

This paper examines the successful business strategy employed by Southwest Airlines with special respect to the recent theories of Paul Lawrence. Long-time professor of organizational behavior at Harvard Business School, Lawrence posited that Renewed Darwinian theory reflected four basic human drives: acquisition, defense, comprehension, and bonding. Given Michael Porter’s assessment of the distinctions between cost leadership and differentiation, my analysis reveals that Southwest succeeded in maintaining its competitive market niche for the air-travel industry by engaging in a strongly economistic, cost leadership strategy that primarily incorporated and prioritized aspects of the drives to acquire and defend. In doing so …