This conceptual paper proposes a synthesis of the Resource-Based View (RBV), and the School of Industrial Organization (IO) based on a framework developed by Philipson (1980). The framwork was developed after a little known work by Marx (1969): “Resultate des unmittelbares produktionsprozesses”. Philipson explored the concepts ”levels of functions of capital”, after Bettelheim (1970), the ”generalization of capital functions”, and used Gramsci’s (1971) concept of ”hegemony”. Two of Marx’ principal concepts were ”inner” and ”outer” conditions of production.  These preempted RBV and IO, which appeared hundred years later. In spite of the development of the RBV and the IO over the last 30 years, the most interesting questions to pursue for strategy research are how companies transcend their resources to reinvent themselves and how they transcend their resources to face new environmental conditions of which they do not have enough experience and resources; hence the transcendence of their limitations. The present article contributes with a phenomenology for studying firm strategy giving precedence to a different mix of the two schools.