摘要：Agribusiness, like many industrial sectors, faces huge challenges in the new millennium.Increasing competition, globalization and fragmentation of markets ask ever greaterquestions of managerial decision-making in agribusiness .rms. In other sectors, manage-ment and marketing theorists argue that to meet these challenges, .rms should adopt amarket orientation. A market orientation may be de.ned as `the organizational environmentthat most effectively and ef.ciently generates the behaviors necessary for the creation ofsuperior value for buyers' (Slater & Narver, 1995). The desire to create superior value forcustomers and attain sustainable competitive advantage drives a business to create andmaintain the culture that will produce these behaviors. Within this environment ororganizational culture, management's focus is on the development of superior skills inunderstanding and satisfying customers' needs (Day, 1994). Empirical studies havedemonstrated that adoption of a market orientation can be positively associated withsuperior .rm performance (e.g., Narver & Slater, 1990; Kohli & Jaworski, 1990, 1993;Greenley, 1995; Pelham, 1999). Yet despite the strong theoretical and empirical evidencethat market orientation is useful and fruitful, it has rarely been studied with respect toagribusiness .rms. We investigate the management and organizational behaviors of a sampleof agribusiness .rms in Chile, with two key questions in mind. First, given the recent successof Chilean agribusiness .rms in international markets, we examine the extent to which thiscan be attributed to the adoption of market oriented behavior, as opposed to fortuitouscircumstances.
