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Business realities include delays, unintended downstream consequences, exponential versus linear relationships, “hidden demons,” and virtuous and viscous feedback cycles. Executives often respond to these realities by applying nearsighted short-term solutions that contribute to long-run business failure. We provide core propositions and a framework for causal mapping and testing “micro-worlds” of real-life marketing-buying realities. A microworld is a set of explicit assumptions about how things get done, that is, how each variable in a marketing-buying system relates to other variables in the system. The framework suggests applying eight steps linking systems-thinking cause mapping, policy mapping, and systems dynamics modeling. The chapter reviews case research studies that apply the eight steps. Modeling system dynamics of business relationships aims to run simulations of the resulting microworld model of a specific reality; the main aim goes beyond description and explanation to offer prescriptions that reduce the occurrence of viscous cycles and encourage decisions leading to virtuous cycles. Hopefully, this chapter serves to awareness and use of system dynamics tools among case study researchers and executives in business and industrial marketing.

Chapter 16 is an introduction to systems thinking and analyzing the system dynamics of relationships within an organization or between organizations. Systems thinking builds on the propositions that (1) all variables or conditions have both dependent and independent relationships, (2) lag effects occur in relationships, (3) feedback relationships occur (e.g., A→B→C→A), and (4) seemingly minor relationships (i.e., “hidden demons”) have huge influence in causing a set of relationships (i.e., a system) to implode or explode. The propositions of building and testing a set of relationships apply in many contexts; this chapter examines systems thinking and system dynamics in one context as an introduction to this stream of case study research. Hall (1976) provides details of an advanced application of systems dynamics research – do not be fooled by the date of the study; Hall (1976) is an exceptional up-to-date case research study using system dynamics modeling. This chapter describes the issues and criticisms concerning golf, tourism, and the environment and considers how golf–tourism–environment relationships might achieve economic well-being for a region while avoiding vicious cycles of destruction to local environments and the quality of life of local residents. The examination proposes the use of systems thinking, cause mapping, and system dynamics modeling and simulations of golf, tourism, and environmental relationships to help achieve workable solutions agreeable to all stakeholders. Sustainable relationships that include golf, tourism, and environmental objectives require crafting government policies via stakeholder participation of all parties that such relationships affect – recognizing and enabling this requirement needs to be done explicitly – to reduce conflicts among stakeholders and avoid system failures.

Seeks to advocate adopting the comparative case study method and system dynamics modeling to inform theory and to prescribe executive actions for successfully managing new products built using radically new technologies.

Reviews NPD theory and research on the dynamic processes including feedback loops and the hidden demons (hard to identify weak linkages that have large downstream impacts) in radically new innovation, manufacturing, diffusion and adoption/rejection processes; examines the IMDAR process model (innovation‐manufacturing‐diffusion‐adoption/rejection) of new products.

Several alternative routes of tacit and explicit interorganizational behaviors and decisions lead to NPD successes and failures; while executives believe surveys identifying specific factors are important particularly for NPD success, none of these factors is necessary or sufficient by itself for explaining success – specific cases of NPD success occur in the absence of any one of the identified success factors – embracing a system dynamics rather than a main effects view of NPD success and failure provides solid grounding for useful theory and practice in NPD.

Does not provide an empirical comparison between cross‐sectional data‐based modelling versus system dynamics analysis. Business and industrial marketing research that embraces complexity and examines decision and actions over multiple time periods is still in its infancy.

Most successful companies suffer from their success: they fail to remain watchful, mindful, and active with regard to new technological developments that seemingly have minor relationships to their industries.

This paper offers a theory‐of‐the‐firm system dynamics approach to inform new product executives to think beyond check‐lists and embrace multiple‐path thinking.

Chapter 18 closes the book with twelve principles relevant for doing case study research. The chapter includes brief discussions of specific must-read literature for each principle. The discussion also emphasizes that accuracy (validity) comes first, not generality. The chapter emphasizes that the dominant logic in seeking generality by using surveys whereby informants write-out answers, tick boxes, and never have the opportunity to answer questions that they themselves frame fails to deliver accuracy except possibly when informants are describing evaluating their own recent experiences (see Chapter 2 for further details). The following key thoughts signify the twelve principles:

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  Configural not net effects

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  Unconscious not conscious thinking

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  Dynamic not cross sectional designs

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  Multiple routes not one model only

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  Predictive validity not only a best fitting model

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  Context not context free

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  Conjunctive-disjunctive not compensatory decision-making

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  Systems thinking not independent versus dependent conditions

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  Multi-person not one-person

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  Satisfy not optimize decisions

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  Unobtrusive evidence not just obtrusive interviews or observations

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  Visual not just verbal data collection and interpretation.

Configural not net effects

Unconscious not conscious thinking

Dynamic not cross sectional designs

Multiple routes not one model only

Predictive validity not only a best fitting model

Context not context free

Conjunctive-disjunctive not compensatory decision-making

Systems thinking not independent versus dependent conditions

Multi-person not one-person

Satisfy not optimize decisions

Unobtrusive evidence not just obtrusive interviews or observations

Visual not just verbal data collection and interpretation.

If we are concerned about the imprecision of case studies as research data, we can console ourselves by noting that a man named Darwin was able to write about a study of the Galapagos Islands and a few other cases. To the best of my recollection, there are not statistics in Darwin's book (Simon, 1991, p. 128).

This chapter documents the contributions in the business-to-business (B2B) marketing–buying literature that focus on implemented strategies in specific contexts. Research on implemented strategies often includes thick descriptions of how things actually get done over a period of weeks, months, or years including how decision makers make sense of situations, go about processing information, make choices, interact with other decision makers, participate in specific actions, and interpret events and outcomes. Research on implemented strategies favors “direct research” (Mintzberg, 1979) that includes multiple face-to-face interviews of the same and different participants in B2B processes over the course of days, week, months, or years. Direct research is inherently inductive theory-building and case-based data driven in its theory-empirical approach. Direct research includes applying a number of possible research methods and results in a number of advances in B2B implemented-strategy-in-context theory.

The principal objective here is to describe conceptual and research tools for achieving deeper sense‐making of what happened and why it happened –including how participants interpret outcomes of what happened and the dynamics of emic (executive) and etic (researcher) sense‐making.

This article uses a mixed research design including decision systems analysis, cognitive mapping, computer software‐based text analysis, and the long interview method for mapping the mental models of the participants in specific decision‐making processes as well as mapping the immediate, feedback, and downstream influences of decisions‐actions‐outcomes.

The findings in the empirical study support the view that decision processes are prospective, introspective, and retrospective, sporadically rational, ultimately affective, and altogether imaginatively unbounded.

Not using outside auditors to evaluate post‐etic interpretations is recognized as a method limitation to the extended case study; such outside auditor reports represent an etic‐4 level of interpretation. Incorporating such etic‐4 interpretation is one suggestion for further research.

Asking executives for in‐depth stories about what happened and why helps them reflect and uncover very subtle nuances of what went right and what went wrong.

A series advanced hermeneutic B2B research reports of a specific issue (e.g., new product innovation processes) provides an advance for developing a grounded theory of what happened and why it happened. Such a large‐scale research effort enables more rigorous, accurate and useful generalizations of decision making on a specific issue than is found in literature reviews of models of complex systems.

Seeks to introduce a JBIM special issue of articles that moves the innovation‐diffusion‐adoption (IDA) literature beyond identifying key success factors to thick descriptions of the dynamics of human interactions and the enactment of decisions‐events‐outcomes using multiple rounds of informant‐researcher interpretations.

Adopts the view that informants' views as to what is happening, why it is happening, and the consequences of what is happening often go through a series of revisions depending on when the informant data are collected.

Individuals successful in guiding IDA processes exhibit great adaptability in going around and through road‐blocks that they encounter over the months and years from innovation to market success. Informants in second and third interviews provide critical information on process nuances that go unreported in single‐meeting interviews.

Specific case studies are absent of how executives might use such process data to revise their sense‐making and improve decisions based on insights that become available only through such explicit retrospection. The implication is that this special issue is a stepping‐stone from cross‐sectional survey research to system dynamics research with hands‐on participation by executives.

Now one should get real, describe, understand, and play inside IDA processes in real‐time with executives and researchers working together via multiple meetings using system dynamics research tools.

For IDA research this special issue calls for embracing a revolution ending the dominance of closed‐end self‐completed survey data to using multiple‐rounds of face‐to‐face interviews and direct observations with informant revisions of findings.

Chapter 2 describes how behavioral science research methods that management and marketing scholars apply in studying processes involving decisions and organizational outcomes relate to three principal research objectives: fulfilling generality of findings, achieving accuracy of process actions and outcomes, and capturing complexity of nuances and conditions. The chapter's unique contribution is in advocating and describing the possibilities of researchers replacing Thorngate's (1976) “postulate of commensurate complexity” — it is impossible for a theory of social behavior to be simultaneously general, accurate, and simple and as a result organizational theorists inevitably have to make tradeoffs in their theory development — with a new postulate of disproportionate achievement. This new postulate proposes the possibilities and advocates the building and testing of useful process models that achieve all three principal research objectives. Rather than assuming the stance that a researcher must make tradeoffs that permit achieving any two, but not all three, principal research objectives as, Weick (1979) clock analogy shows, this chapter advocates embracing a property space (a three-dimensional box rather than a clock) view of research objectives and research methods. Tradeoffs need not be made; having-your-cake-and-eating-it-too is possible. The chapter includes a brief review of principal criticisms that case study researchers often express of surveys of respondents using fixed-point surveys. Likewise, the chapter reviews principal criticisms of case study research studies that researchers who favor the use of fixed-point surveys express.

Purpose – In this chapter, I examine the ways that various trauma carriers, including social movements, self-identified survivors, professional organizations, and advocates make public claims about trauma and the PTSD diagnosis as they work to define moral and political issues.

Methodology/approach – Employing the method of social pattern analysis, I analyze a variety of narrative data pertaining to issues such as child sexual abuse, war, slavery, and genocide.

Findings – Trauma carriers engage in significant social memory work and collective identity work, define social problems, and practice social activism as they address the causes and consequences of psychological suffering. Within the context of modern diagnostic psychiatry, the PTSD diagnosis stands out as a unique narrative of social illness. The PTSD diagnosis is a powerful cultural script that various individuals and interest groups use to interpret mental health symptoms while attributing psychological consequences to social causes as opposed to problems rooted in the individual's psyche (as with psychoanalysis) or neurophysiology (as with modern diagnostic psychiatry). By implication, the social world must be “cured” for the individual to be healthy.

Originality/value of paper – I detail the unique sociocognitive implications of the PTSD diagnosis, highlighting its impact on our collective understanding of particular traumatic experiences and the shared nature of posttraumatic affect. I show the relevance of social memory studies, the more broadly conceived sociology of culture and cognition – especially as it pertains to collective identity and classification norms, the sociology of health-focused social movements, and the analysis of social problems claims-making to an emerging sociology of diagnosis.