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The environment surrounding U.S. higher education has changed substantially over the past 40 years. However, we have a limited understanding of what these changes mean for the higher education organizations (HEOs) that occupy this organizational field. In this paper, I use descriptive statistics and multilevel latent class analysis (MLCA) to analyze the financial behaviors of public four-year HEOs from 1986 to 2010 to evaluate how HEOs adapt financially to their changing environments. I advance the current conceptual and empirical understanding of public HEO behaviors by evaluating how public HEOs utilize combinations of revenue and spending streams to accomplish their mission and the extent to which the revenues and spending patterns of these institutions are related. Descriptive results confirm the shift away from state funding toward tuition revenues and the relative stability in spending patterns. MLCA results, which allow for the investigation of how combinations of revenue and spending streams work together, indicate that public HEOs are changing the combinations of revenues they rely on in different ways, revealing multiple specific pathways for how public HEOs adapt to their changing environments. The spending profiles, in contrast, remain stable with only a few HEOs changing their profile over time. I argue that the loose coupling between revenues and spending and discontinuity in their patterns of change over time suggests that public HEOs are able to establish a buffer between their environment and spending or activities that allows them to continue engaging in the same broad set of activities despite environmental changes.

This chapter describes how micro-locational factors affect international alliance formation. The authors focus specifically on the role of global cities, which are studied from a distance perspective. The authors argue that distances must be apprehended not at the country level but at the city level. The chapter is an attempt to provide a better understanding of the complex, multilevel factors that interact when firms select an alliance partner in a particular location. The authors take an explorative methodological approach through a configurational analysis of international alliances made by American companies in 2015. The main contribution is the proposition of a typology of micro-locational characteristics to help understand international alliance formation at a city level.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to review the methodological and empirical underpinnings of transport network screening, or management, as it relates to improving road safety. As jurisdictions around the world are charged with transport network management in order to reduce externalities associated with road crashes, identifying potential blackspots or hotspots is an important if not critical function and responsibility of transport agencies.

Methodology – Key references from within the literature are summarised and discussed, along with a discussion of the evolution of thinking around hotspot identification and management. The theoretical developments that correspond with the evolution in thinking are provided, sprinkled with examples along the way.

Findings – Hotspot identification methodologies have evolved considerably over the past 30 or so years, correcting for methodological deficiencies along the way. Despite vast and significant advancements, identifying hotspots remains a reactive approach to managing road safety – relying on crashes to accrue in order to mitigate their occurrence. The most fruitful directions for future research will be in the establishment of reliable relationships between surrogate measures of road safety – such as ‘near misses’ – and actual crashes – so that safety can be proactively managed without the need for crashes to accrue.

Research implications – Research in hotspot identification will continue; however, it is likely to shift over time to both closer to ‘real-time’ crash risk detection and considering safety improvements using surrogate measures of road safety – described in Chapter 17.

Practical implications – There are two types of errors made in hotspot detection – identifying a ‘risky’ site as ‘safe’ and identifying a ‘safe’ site as ‘risky’. In the former case no investments will be made to improve safety, while in the latter case ineffective or inefficient safety improvements could be made. To minimise these errors, transport network safety managers should be applying the current state of the practice methods for hotspot detection. Moreover, transport network safety managers should be eager to transition to proactive methods of network safety management to avoid the need for crashes to occur. While in its infancy, the use of surrogate measures of safety holds significant promise for the future.

The effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on cities have transformed the lives of urban societies across the globe. One of such effects has been the redefinition of access and urban mobility patterns, exposing divides and inequalities along the lines of class, gender and social positions. In Latin America, long-term lockdowns and widespread containment-oriented restrictions have deepened already acute conditions of poverty and deprivation. Low-income and socially vulnerable households and individuals in countries such as Colombia find themselves unable, or in a disadvantaged position, to work from home, access goods and services securely and avoid transport modes that increase exposure to contagion. This chapter examines inequalities in urban mobility and access to essential opportunities in urban settings in Colombia, through data collected from 3,900 respondents to a web survey organised during the national lockdown in the country in April 2020. The chapter presents a Latent Class Analysis model exploring how intersecting differences in class, gender, ethnicity, age and other relevant socioeconomic characteristics, influence the degree of adaptability and capacity to adapt to the challenging conditions posed by COVID-19 for physical travel and carrying out everyday activities. Building on three distinct classes of mobility and access-related conditions, the chapter reflects on structural inequalities associated with Colombian cities’ urban form, functional and productive structures and its wide social gaps. The chapter builds on empirical findings to reflect on urban policy and discuss avenues for addressing social and spatial inequalities worsened by the pandemic.

The aim of this chapter is to: (1) model culture as a configuration of multiple values, (2) identify different culture archetypes across the globe, and (3) empirically demonstrate heterogeneity in culture archetypes within and across 52 countries. We use Schwartz values from the World Values Survey (WVS) and the archetypal analysis (AA) method to identify diverse culture archetypes within and across countries. We find significant heterogeneity in culture values archetypes within countries and homogeneity across countries, calling into question the assumption of uniform national culture values in economics and other fields. We show how the heterogeneity in culture values across the globe can be represented with a small number of distinctive archetypes. The study could be extended to include a larger set of countries, and/or cover a broader range of theoretically grounded values than those available in the Schwartz values model in the WVS. Research and practice often assume cultural homogeneity within nations and cultural diversity across nations. Our finding of different culture archetypes within countries and similar archetypes across countries demonstrates the important role of culture sharing and exchange as a source of reducing cultural conflicts between nations and enhancing creativity and innovation through interaction and integration in novel ways. We examine culture as a configuration of multiple values, and use a novel AA method to capture heterogeneity in culture values within and across countries.

Customer segmentation is an important research area that helps organizations to improve their services according to customer needs. With the increased information that shows customer attitudes, it is much easier and also more necessary than before to analyze customer responses on different campaigns. Recency, frequency, and monetary (RFM) analysis allows us to segment customers according to their common features. In this chapter, customer segmentation and RFM analysis are explained first, then a real case application of RFM analysis on customer segmentation for a Fuel company is presented. At the end of the application part, possible strategies for the company are generated.

Firm’s operating contexts and asymmetric perspectives of success versus failure outcomes are two essential features typically absent in research on firms’ implemented strategies. The study here describes and provides examples of formal case-based models (i.e., constructing algorithms) of firms implemented strategies within several of 81 potential context (task environments) configurations – large vs small, service vs production orientation, low vs high competitive intensity, low vs high technological turbulence, and ambiguous settings for each. The study applies the tenets of complexity theory (e.g., equifinality, causal asymmetry, and single causal insufficiency). The study proposes a meso-theory and empirical testing position for solving “the crucial problem in strategic management” (Powell, Lovallo, & Fox, 2011, p. 1370) – firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. A workable solution is to identify/describe implemented executive capability strategies that identify firms in alternative specific task environments which are consistently accurate in predicting success (or failure) of all firms for specific implemented capabilities/context configuration. The study shows how researchers can perform “statistical sameness testing” and avoid the telling weaknesses and “corrupt practices” of symmetric tests such as multiple regression analysis (Hubbard, 2015) including null hypothesis significance testing. The study includes testing the research issues using survey responses of 405 CEO and chief marketing officers in 405 Hungarian firms. The study describes algorithms indicating success cases (firms) as well as failure cases via deductive, inductive, and abductive fuzzy-set logic of capabilities in context solutions.

The traditional and still dominant logic among nearly all empirical positivist researchers in schools of management is to write symmetric (two-directional) variable hypotheses (SVH) even though the same researchers formulate their behavioral theories at the case (typology) identification level. Cyert and March’s (1963), Cyert, R. M., & March, J. G. (1963). A behavioral theory of the firm. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall), Howard and Sheth’s (1969, Howard, J. A., & Sheth, J. N. (1969). The theory of buyer behavior. New York, NY: Wiley), and Miles, R. E., & Snow, C. C.’s (1978, Miles, R. E., & Snow, C. C. (1978). Organizational strategy, structure, and process. [A. D. Meyer, collaborator; H. J. Coleman Jr., contributor]. New York, NY: McGraw Hill) typologies of organizations’ strategy configurations (e.g., “Prospectors, Analyzers, and Defenders”) are iconic examples of formulating theory at the case identification level. When testing such theories, most researchers automatically, nonconsciously, switch from building theory of beliefs, attitudes, and behavior at the case identification level to empirically testing of two-directional relationships and additive net-effect influences of variables. Formulating theory focusing on creating case identification hypotheses (CIH) to describe, explain, and predict behavior and then empirically testing at SVH is a mismatch and results in shallow data analysis and frequently inaccurate contributions to theory. This chapter describes the mismatch and resulting unattractive outcomes as well as the pervasive practice of examining only fit validity in empirical studies using symmetric tests. The chapter reviews studies in the literature showing how matching both case-based theory and empirical positivist research of CIH is possible and produces findings that advance useful theory and critical thinking by executives and researchers.

This chapter opens the second part of the Volume, focusing on the small farms' role and dynamics within the evolving food system. Assessing small farmers' actual and potential contribution to the change towards a sustainable food and nutrition security requires a deep understanding of their strategic decision-making processes. These processes take place in a context highly conditioned by internal and external conditions, including the complex relations between farm and household, which are mapped and described. Building on an adaptation of Porter's model (Porter, 1990), the chapter investigates how farmers, given those conditions, define their strategies (in particular their innovation strategies) aimed at economic and financial sustainability through a multidisciplinary analysis of scientific literature. Internal conditions are identified in the light of the Agricultural Household Model (Singh & Subramanian, 1986) which emphasizes how family farming strategies aim at combining business-related objectives, and family welfare. Then, a comprehensive set of external conditions is identified and then grouped within eight categories: ‘Factors’, ‘Demand’, ‘Finance and Risk’, ‘Regulation and Policy’, ‘Technological’, ‘Ecological’, ‘Socio-institutional’ and ‘Socio-demographic’. Similarly, six types of strategies are identified: ‘Agro-industrial competitiveness’, ‘Blurring farm borders’, ‘Rural development’, ‘Risk management’, ‘Political support’ and ‘Coping with farming decline’.

Purpose – To study misbehavior as a form of dissent and resistance in an organized labor situation where traditional forms of labor unrest are suppressed and the implications for how we understand the socio-political processes through which misbehavior is constructed.

Methodology/approach – Archival research, cluster analysis, thematic analysis, critical discourse analysis, actor-network theory

Findings – Misbehavior is linked to a series of sociological practices not least of which is the production of knowledge through actor-networks and their relationship to far-reaching discourses. In the empirical material we find a conflict between discourses of labor solidarity and unfair management practices and discourses of patriotism and anticommunism.

Research limitations/implications (if applicable) – This research is based on archival data, as such it is subject to the choices of holders to contribute and archivists to collect.

Practical implications (if applicable) – This work has implications for labor leadership in the understanding of which disputes may be constrained by contextual discourses and by management in the exploration of possible means of suppressing labor unrest.

Social implications – We have found that labor unrest may be constrained by contextual discourse but that suppressed unrest may result in misbehavior and other forms of counterproductive workplace activities.

Originality/value of chapter – The relationship between contextual discourse and employee misbehavior has not been studied in depth. This work presents a new view of the struggles of the unionized workplace.