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Despite widespread interest in “behavioral strategy,” it is not clear what this term, or its associated academic subfield, is all about. Unless a critical mass of scholars can agree on the meaning of behavioral strategy, and professionally identify with it, this embryonic community may face a marginal existence. We describe three alternative conceptions for the academic subfield of behavioral strategy, along with assessments of the pros and cons of each. The “small tent” version amounts to a direct transposition of the logic of behavioral economics to the field of strategic management, specifically in the style of behavioral decision research. The “midsize tent” view is that behavioral strategy is a commitment to understanding the psychology of strategists. And the “large tent’ view includes consideration of any and all psychological, sociological, and political factors that influence strategic outcomes. We conclude that the midsize tent represents the best path forward, not too narrow and not too broad, allowing rich scope but with coherence. The large tent conception of behavioral strategy, however, is not out of the question and warrants serious consideration.

Analysis of organizational decline has become central to the study of economy and society. Further advances in this area may fail however, because two major literatures on the topic remain disintegrated and because both lack a sophisticated account of how social structure and interdependencies among organizations affect decline. This paper develops a perspective which tries to overcome these problems. The perspective explains decline through an understanding of how social ties and resource dependencies among firms affect market structure and the resulting behavior of firms within it. Evidence is furnished that supports the assumptions of the perspective and provides a basis for specifying propositions about the effect of network structure on organizational survival. I conclude by discussing the perspective’s implications for organizational theory and economic sociology.

While multinational companies develop meta-level policies to address grand sustainability challenges and CEOs are increasingly showing their social activism, the hard work of concretely defending communities’ rights and the environment from business exploitation is often left to powerless individuals, known as human rights defenders (here defenders), who face severe risks for their advocacy. According to some statistics, between 2015 and 2022, defenders worldwide have been subject to over 4,000 attacks, including killings, tortures, and intimidation. In this chapter, the authors discuss the relevance of defenders to the promotion of the sustainable development goal (SDG) agenda and develop a conceptual model to predict CEOs’ reactions to defenders.

Managerial constraint is a central theme in strategic management research. Although discussed using a variety of labels (including choice and determinism) and theoretical perspectives (including resource dependence and population ecology), the common question is the degree to which executives have choices or options when making decisions. Two of the most commonly used approaches for discussing constraint are organizational task environments (Dess & Beard, 1984) and managerial discretion (Hambrick & Finkelstein, 1987). These two papers share substantial commonalities in both their theoretical background and operationalization, raising the question of whether discretion and task environment are indeed separate constructs. This chapter reviews both conceptual and methodological issues associated with the use of task environment and discretion. Drawing on a review of published studies and original data analysis, we offer methodological suggestions for future research.

Strategic option generation is a fundamental step in strategy formulation. Several lenses have been proposed to explain its foundations, including the microeconomics positioning school, and the resource and capabilities based view of the firm. These approaches are largely based on inductive and deductive logics, which are not the logics that provide strategic options that are potentially novel, profitable, and largely differentiated from competitive offerings. In this chapter, we propose a unifying framework of the cognitive foundations of strategic option generation. Building on five fundamental cognitive acts – imitation, framing, analogical reasoning, abductive reasoning, and mental simulation, this proposed model both synthesizes the extant literature and provides guidance about promising avenues for future theoretical and empirical research.

Upper echelons research considers the relationship of top executives to organizational attributes or outcomes, vis-à-vis, their individual or group demographic characteristics such as tenure or experience. The upper echelons perspective is typically associated with the theorizing of Hambrick and Mason in their 1984 Academy of Management Review article, but also has much broader and deeper organizational theory roots as demonstrated by Pfeffer's (1983) earlier exhaustive review of organizational demography. Since the early 1980s, hundreds of upper echelons studies have been published – some explicitly invoking the upper echelons theoretical perspective, while others employing its underlying methodology of relying on executive demographic characteristics as proxies for executive and top management team (TMT) related constructs. This chapter examines three important features and their related challenges and opportunities in future upper echelons research. Specifically, we focus on (1) the identification of upper echelons constructs, (2) embedding those constructs in a meaningful way to develop new theory or better our understanding of extant theory, and (3) the related operationalization and measurement of those constructs that are eventually included in qualitative and quantitative analyses using TMT demographics. We conclude our chapter by drawing these three features together to provide a benchmark process to gauge the theoretical and methodological contributions of upper echelons-related work, and ultimately improve the chances of getting such research published.