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The predominant view of positioning in both the literature and practice – a remarkably uni- or two-dimensional view – asks these questions: (1) What dimension should the product or service be positioned on, for example, unique styling, design, performance, and quality? (2) What category does the product or service compete in or belong to? So marketers therefore ask: Should the computer brand be positioned as reliable (Dell), or faster (Toshiba)? Research on economic value is well established in the pricing literature, especially in business-to-business pricing. Most of this literature focuses on differentiation value, that is, how to calculate the worth of the differential benefits a customer receives from using the firm's product versus the competitive substitute. But a much less studied area of this research deals with the price of the competitive reference product, or competitive frame of reference. Rarely do marketers extend positioning strategy to the level of economic value, asking: How is the product framed, and how valuable is the frame? The purpose of this chapter is to explore competitive frames of reference in business-to-business positioning. Specifically, what are alternative types of frames of reference? What is the role of the reference price in frames of reference? What are the implications of choosing one type of frame of reference versus another?

This chapter traces the development of the pricing research program of Kent Monroe, beginning with his doctoral dissertation and continuing to the present time. Drawing on psychophysics and adaptation-level theory the early research efforts concentrated on validating two important concepts relative to behavioral pricing research: reference price and acceptable price range. Then the behavioral pricing research program expanded to explore how the context of a purchase situation, including the structure of the prices available for judgment, influences buyers' price perceptions and willingness to buy. In the early years his research included pricing models and research on patronage behavior. Subsequently, concentrating primarily on behavioral pricing research, he began to integrate findings from the research program into examining how various sellers pricing strategies and tactics influence buyers' judgments and purchase decisions. These efforts led to the first edition of his book Pricing – Making Profitable Decisions published in 1979. The book was subsequently revised and expanded in 1990 and again in 2003.

This chapter reports on a longitudinal quasi-experimental field study within an organizational design of a global consumer products manufacturer moving toward high-performance work systems (HPWSs) in North America by integrating business centers and self-directed work teams (SDWTs) coupled with 13 other action-levers within an integrated and bundled high-performance organizations (HPOs) re-design. The results of this organizational design effort are assessed using different types and levels of organizational outcomes (hard record data, behavioral, and attitudinal measures) along a 5-year temporal dimension punctuated by multiple time periods (baseline, during, and after). The organization, which was “built to change” (Lawler & Worley, 2006), in this research had already highly superior or “exemplar” (Collins, 2001) levels of organizational performance. Consequently, the real research question becomes: “What effect does state of the art organizational design and development have on an exemplar organization?” The study also calls into question the field's ability to truly assess exemplar organizations with existing measures of organizational change and development.

The construct of “tradition” is commonly used in studies of society and culture and refers to historically patterned institutionalized practices that emphasize the “presentness of the past” in their transmission. However, there is “very little analysis of the properties of tradition” (Shils, 1971, p. 124), especially in the management literature. We draw on illustrative examples from Martha Stewart Living magazine to reveal the use and meanings of traditions and their relevance to understanding institutional micro-foundations in contemporary living. We investigate how organizations bundle various aspects of institutions in their presentation, and seek to advance theory on how institutions matter in everyday life.

Bundled payments for care are an efficient mechanism to align payer, provider, and patient incentives in the provision of health care services for an episode of care. In this chapter, we use agency theory to examine the evolution of bundled payment programs in private and public payer arrangements, and postulate future directions for bundled payment development as a key component in the provision and payment of health care services.

Drawing on a case study of the adoption of an American organizational form – the “Academic Health Science Centre” (or “AHSC”) – in English healthcare, the authors develop a model of the “translation work” required to translate an organizational form from one organizational field to another. The findings contribute to the literature on translation and shed light on the microfoundations of institutions by examining the complex relationship among agency, meaning, institutions, and temporality that underpin the translation of a contested organizational form. The authors also show the important, but limited, role of agency when translation occurs at the broad field level and argue that the translation of organization forms can, in at least some situations, best be understood as a “garbage can” rather than the linear and agentic view usually described in the translation literature.

In this paper, I compare Theodore Schatzki’s practice theory, the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger upon whom Schatzki drew in its formation, and my own theory of institutional logics which I have sought to develop as a religious sociology of institution. I examine how Schatzki and I both differently locate our thinking at the level of practice. In this essay I also explore the possibility of appropriating Heidegger’s religious ontology of worldhood, which Schatzki rejects, in that project. My institutional logical position is an atheological religious one, poly-onto-teleological. Institutional logics are grounded in ultimate goods which are praiseworthy “objects” of striving and practice, signifieds to which elements of an institutional logic have a non-arbitrary relation, sources of and references for practical norms about how one should have, make, do or be that good, and a basis of knowing the world of practice as ordered around such goods. Institutional logics are constellations co-constituted by substances, not fields animated by values, interests or powers.

Because we are speaking against “values,” people are horrified at a philosophy that ostensibly dares to despise humanity’s best qualities. For what is more “logical” than that a thinking that denies values must necessarily pronounce everything valueless? Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” (2008a, p. 249).

Organizational literatures stress the empowering effects of worker participation programs. The case of a Mexican garment factory is used to examine the contradictory location of women in self-managed teams. While self-managed teams require independent and assertive workers, women workers are hired specifically for their docility. I argue that managers provide the tools and mechanisms for workers to be autonomous decision-makers, while at the same time they gender teams in ways that assure continued female disadvantage. Placed in this contradictory location, women workers both reproduce and resist gender subordination by carving out spaces of independent action, using the language of traditional womanhood.

In this chapter, we examine the interplay between external legitimacy judgments, internal identity beliefs, and conceptions of sustainability. Based on observation at industry events and interviews with key stakeholders, we examine how organizational actors interpret the concept of sustainability in civil aviation, an industry subject to intense legitimacy threat for its environmental impact. We find that the concept of sustainability is interpreted through a process of naturalization, by which conceptual ties to past practices are forged, and the concept becomes corrupted. We describe three mechanisms (relabeling, bundling, and zooming out) through which concept naturalization occurs, and we show how this process creates resonance between sustainability and an industry ethos, which captures the aspirations, ideals and values of the industry.