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Reports on a study that examines a model of risk behaviour in which the effects of risk propensity and problem framing are jointly evaluated. Managers from 58 oil industry organizations were presented with hypothetical business decisions involving significant gains and losses, and asked to choose between action alternatives resulting in certain outcomes or probabilistic outcomes. Also evaluates the notion that tendencies towards risk taking are complex, reflecting personality traits, habits and experience. There was support for a historical basis for risk propensity, but risk preferences were not found to be influential. Further, although both risk propensity and problem framing were found to be significant predictors of risk behaviour, there was no support for prospect theory predictions. For researchers, suggests the need to incorporate individual differences into models of risk behaviour. For organizations, suggests the need for management attention to members’ risk experiences.

This chapter outlines purpose, procedure, benefits and limitations of the policy capturing methodology. It further presents an example of use of the methodology.

Prior research on post-acquisition integration has paid little attention to the factors that influence the development of trust between the members of an acquiring firm and those of the target firm. Using a policy capturing approach, we found that five aspects of the takeover situation and the integration process affect target firm members’ trust in the acquiring firm's management: takeover friendliness, national cultural similarity, interaction history of the acquiring firm and the target firm, retained autonomy, and attractiveness of the acquiring firm's HR policies. Our findings suggest that of the five trust antecedents, the attractiveness of the acquirer's HR policies is by far the most powerful predictor of target firm members’ trust in the acquiring firm's management. The implications for post-acquisition integration research and practice are discussed.

Decision‐making studies incorporating risk have typically used risk measures that are generic across industries. Responding to calls for finer‐grained approaches, a recent study used a qualitative approach to discover how managers interpret risk in different industry contexts. Managers from the oil and gas (61), commercial banking (66), and software development (28) sectors were asked an open‐ended question about their conceptualizations of risk in the context of regularly encountered business situations. Resulting textual data were analyzed using QSR NUD*IST. Industry group membership and risk interpretations were found to be significantly related in that the different industry groups showed different distributions of attention to various aspects of risk. For researchers, these findings suggest the need to use differentiated risk measures. For practitioners, the findings suggest potential benefits from broadening cognitions relating to risk.

Welcome to the fourth volume of Research Methodology in Strategy and Management (RMSM). The publication of our fourth volume provides a source of satisfaction because our original contract with Elsevier only guaranteed a three volume run for the series. The popularity of RMSM led our contacts at the publisher to be eager to continue beyond their original commitment. We are excited about the future of the series, and have begun assembling Volume 5.

The preparation of future teachers of young children should incorporate attention to the developmental markers at the heart of developmentally appropriate practice and ground early childhood subject matter learning in disciplinary perspectives, engagement, and thinking essential for later disciplinary learning. With this focus in mind, I described an instructional sequence designed to engage teacher candidates in historical reasoning tasks where they considered the conceptual resources they used to support their own historical reasoning as a point of entry for considering the conceptual resources young children have at their disposal. I presumed that such a comparison would allow candidates to develop the kind of content knowledge for teaching, enabling them to best leverage children’s historical reasoning as a means of deepening children’s historical knowledge and understanding. The analysis indicated that candidates began to construct initial developmental trajectories of children’s historical reasoning and raised pedagogical questions suggesting they began to envision themselves as teachers of historical inquiry.