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The purpose of this paper is to introduce counterfactual analysis and reasoning to the study of accounting history. The counterfactual focus is the institutionalisation of public accountancy in the UK.

The study adopts a counterfactual research design using Ferguson and Bunzl and asks a “what if” question of an event of importance to accounting historians in order to create a plausible counterfactual outcome that is grounded in rationality and causal analysis. The specific counterfactual question relates to the royal charter granted to public accountants practicing in Edinburgh in 1854. The counterfactual outcome is compared to the actual timeline of public accountancy institutionalisation in the UK.

The “alternative” history reveals uncertainties that confronted public accountants in the past and provides a basis for suggesting that the current fractured and inefficient state of institutionalised public accountancy in the UK has its origins at least partially in the 1854 royal charter. It also suggests that attempts to register and unify public accountants in the UK have been hindered by nineteenth century royal charters.

The study argues that counterfactual analysis is a useful historical tool with which to understand the consequences of historical decisions made in the professional project of British public accountancy. In addition, the study reveals the potential for counterfactual analysis to illumine the consequences of decisions in other areas of accounting and auditing history.

This study is the first counterfactual analysis in the accounting history literature and therefore provides a template for further studies and improved research design.

The competitiveness of the Alpine regions is strongly influenced by environmental constraints and its relationship with the urban network in the valley floor, which cannot be one of pure dependence. This study aims to analyse the health of the Italian Alpine economy through the performance of its capital companies, defined as those operating in the strictly mountainous are-as within the territories covered by the Alpine Convention. The authors compare the performance (2012-2018) of the “inner core” firms with a counterfactual sample of companies from neighbouring territories to delineate the strengths and weaknesses of the Alpine enterprises. The paper addresses policymakers and practitioners who will design the future policies for the high lands, exploiting a vast collaborative planning network.

The study analyses two broad strands of literature on territorial competitiveness. It uses the coarsened exact matching techniques for the selection of a counterfactual sample at the enterprise level. The study follows a policy-oriented design, offering answers to future challenges.

The Alpine region has several different local production systems, with a significant level of heterogeneity among firms that differentiate the top 25% from the rest. The counterfactual analysis carried out does not provide clear evidence of significant differences. Instead, it con-firms strong similarities between the Alpine core and the peri-Alpine belt. It is only in terms of employment growth that the core grows less (with a high statistical significance). Finally, the authors introduce the analysis of sustainable value added (SVA) in the core area and use the “tourism chain” to compare different models. The focus here is on two keywords – rarefied and uncontaminated – that enable the transformation of some typical weaknesses of the “minor (or marginal) mountain” into assets for development, provided that place-based and network policies are activated.

The study focusses on the Italian Alps and could be extended in the future to the other countries participating in the Alpine Convention. It may also be enriched by qualitative analyses of partnerships and sole proprietorships that are not identified by the balance sheet analysis.

The study follows a policy-oriented design, offering possible solutions to future challenges.

The study offers some suggestions on the post-COVID-19 phase. The bottom-up, reluctant and community dimension are possible strengths to face the challenges that are opening up.

The study is one of the very few to carry out a counterfactual analysis of Alpine enterprises. It offers evidence on the strengths and weaknesses of the productive fabric of the high lands and updates the assessment of the health status of Alpine enterprises to accompany future fact-based policies after the COVID pandemic.

The aim of this paper is to draw on the social theory of practice to show scenario thinking as an everyday practice and how the practice could be theorised at the meso‐level.

Counterfactual analysis, scenario analysis and peripheral vision are presented as the constituting methodological triad through which scenario thinking comes into representation.

Scenario thinking is a temporally emerging everyday organizational practice. By placing emphasis on the mundane and taken for granted activities that come together to form the nexus of the practice, often deep underlying structures of organizational behaviour contributing to scenario thinking can be theorised.

The practice conceptualisation of scenario thinking inverts and challenges existing management and practitioners' conventional understanding of the practice as an episodic phenomenon in waiting to be facilitated by an expert with specific end points and conformity.

Foresight practitioners and researchers can use this as an analytical starting point for the study and theorising of scenario thinking in self organized groups.

The paper provides a new angle of vision to extend understanding of the development and theorising of scenario thinking in autonomous working groups.

For close to two decades, the West African Monetary Zone (WAMZ) has been preparing to launch a second monetary union within the ECOWAS region. This study aims to determine the impact such a unionised monetary regime will have on financial stability as represented by the nonperforming loan ratios of Ghana in a counterfactual framework.

This study models nonperforming loan ratios as dependent on the monetary policy rate and the business cycle. The study then used historical data to estimate the parameters of the nonperforming loan ratio response function using an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) approach. The estimated parameters are further used to estimate the impact of several counterfactual unionised monetary policy rates on the nonperforming loan ratios and its volatility of Ghana. As robustness check, the Least Absolute Shrinkage Selection Operator (LASSO) regression is also used to estimate the nonperforming loan ratios response function and to predict nonperforming loans under the counterfactual unionised monetary policy rates.

The results of the counterfactual study reveals that the apparent cost of monetary unification is much less than supposed with a monetary union likely to dampen volatility in non-performing loans in Ghana. As such, the WAMZ members should increase the pace towards monetary unification.

The paper contributes to the existing literature by explicitly modelling nonperforming loan ratios as dependent on monetary policy and the business cycle. The study also settles the debate on the financial stability cost of a monetary union due to the nonalignment of business cycles and economic structures.

We examine the potential effect of naturalization on the U.S. immigrants’ earnings. We find the earning gap between naturalized citizens and noncitizens is positive over many years, with a tent shape across the wage distribution. We focus on a normalized metric entropy measure of the gap between distributions, and compare with conventional measures at the mean, median, and other quantiles. In addition, naturalized citizen earnings (at least) second-order stochastically dominate noncitizen earnings in many of the recent years. We construct two counterfactual distributions to further examine the potential sources of the earning gap, the “wage structure” effect and the “composition” effect. Both of these sources contribute to the gap, but the composition effect, while diminishing somewhat after 2005, accounts for about 3/4 of the gap. The unconditional quantile regression (based on the Recentered Influence Function), and conditional quantile regressions confirm that naturalized citizens have generally higher wages, although the gap varies for different income groups, and has a tent shape in many years.

Developing and implementing strategies to maximize profitability is a fundamental challenge facing manufacturers. The complexity of orchestrating resources in practice has been overlooked in the operations field and it is now necessary to go beyond the direct effects of individual resources and uncover different resource configurations that maximize profitability. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Drawing on a sample of US manufacturing firms, multiple regression analysis (MRA) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) are performed to examine the effects of resource orchestration on firm profitability over time. By comparing the findings between analyses, the study represents a move away from examining the net effects of resource levers on performance alone.

The findings characterize the resource conditions for manufacturers’ high performance, and also for absence of high performance. Pension and retirement expense is a core resource condition with R&D and SG&A as consistent peripheral conditions for profitability. Moreover, although workforce size was found to have a significant negative effect under MRA, this plays a role in manufacturers’ performance as a peripheral resource condition under fsQCA.

Accounting for different resource deployment configurations, this study deepens knowledge of resource orchestration and presents findings that enable manufacturers to maximize profitability. An empirical contribution is offered by the introduction of a new method for examining manufacturing strategy configurations: fsQCA.

This study aims to investigate the configurations that drive employee service recovery. Rather than analyzing the net effects of individual antecedents of service recovery, which is the common approach in the literature, this study uses a configurational approach to investigate how five antecedents (customer service orientation, rewards, teamwork, empowerment and customer service training) combine to yield employee adaptive and proactive service recovery behaviors.

The study collects responses from 90 frontline employees through an online survey. Building on configurational theory, the authors developed and empirically validated four research propositions by using a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.

Three equifinal configurations of managerial practices result in either employee proactive or adaptive service recovery behaviors. Two of these three configurations result in both adaptive and proactive behaviors. In addition, the findings show that two out of the three configurations that lead to proactive behavior in service recovery also lead to the simultaneous existence of proactive and adaptive behaviors in service recovery. None of the sufficient configurations require the presence of all managerial practices. These results underscore that managers do not have to act on every single managerial intervention area to promote service recovery.

The study advances the knowledge on the antecedents of employee behavior in service recovery by investigating how these antecedents combine to yield different recipes for developing either employee adaptive or proactive behavior in service recovery.

The findings provide insights for managers into the different combinations of practices that can be used to develop employee proactive or adaptive behavior in service recovery.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study that relies on a configurational approach to understand the combinations of managerial practices that result in employee proactive and adaptive behaviors in service recovery.

Purpose – This chapter examines the potential of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) for strategy research.

Methodology/approach – We introduce the set-theoretic framework of QCA and provide an overview of recent methodological developments.

Findings – We utilize a variety of examples relevant to strategy research to illustrate the action steps and key concepts involved in conducting a QCA study.

Originality/value of paper – We develop examples from core research areas in strategic management to illustrate QCA's potential for examining issues of causality and diversity in strategy research, and in settings involving medium-N samples. We conclude by emphasizing that QCA offers an alternative mode of inquiry to open and redirect important lines of strategy research.

Building on construal level theory (CLT), this study explores mental representations of entrepreneurial intentions (EIs) with different foci (i.e. social and commercial) among university students from Generations Y and Z.

Using a sample of university students from the United States contacted through the Entrepreneurship Education Project, this study employs a configurational perspective—fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA)—to identify the pathways leading to EIs and social entrepreneurial intentions (SEIs).

Results show that the configurations of conditions leading to the outcomes (EI and SEI) are not disparate but share far more similarities even when considering socially oriented antecedents, supporting the claim that students perceive both EIs with different foci as high-level construals. The results also demonstrate no differences within gender, but there are asymmetries between gender in the configurations leading to EI and SEI.

This study contributes to EI literature by providing new insights into understanding how individuals perceive EIs at an early stage of entrepreneurship and by bringing CLT to the EI literature.

These results have implications for entrepreneurship education and practice, as it recognizes that students' EIs are psychologically distant, lacking a level of detail and specificity. This would explain why students do not immediately create ventures, but that entrepreneurship has a certain incubation time to create an entrepreneurial mindset.

Exploring the configurational approaches can help to uncover the complexity and idiosyncrasies underlying EIs.