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Who is ultimately responsible for the harms that befall us? Corporations who make dangerous products, or the consumers who use them? The answer to this question has a profound impact on how personal injury lawyers screen products liability cases. In this chapter, I analyze results from an experimental vignette study in which 83 lawyers were asked to evaluate a hypothetical products liability case. Half of the lawyers practice in states considered to be difficult jurisdictions for the practice of personal injury law due to tort reform and conservative political climates (Texas and Colorado), while the other half work in states that have been relatively unaffected by tort reform and are considered to be more “plaintiff friendly” (Pennsylvania and Massachusetts). While lawyers in reform states and non-reform states were equally likely to accept the hypothetical case with which they were presented, they approached the case in different ways, used different theories, and made different arguments in order to justify their acceptance of the case. Lawyers in states with tort reform were most likely to accept the case when they focused on the issue of corporate social responsibility – that is, what the defendant did wrong, how they violated the rules, and how they could have prevented the injury in question. Lawyers in non-reform states, however, were most likely to accept the case when they believed that jurors would feel sorry for the injured child and not find their client at fault for the injury.

This chapter examines the sources of variation in organizational form among accounting and law firms. We first summarize research in the organization of professional service firms and explain its evolution. This is followed by the argument that variations around the P2 archetype have emerged in response to different market and institutional pressures faced by accounting and law firms. Drawing on contingency and institutional theory, we show how the changing balance between the influence of market and institutional factors has resulted in structural variation.

The purpose of this study was to explore the innovative and proactive practices adopted by subsistence businesses under the COVID-19 health contingency. Evidence of the current situation and the contingency practices that businesses have implemented in dealing with the economic crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic was collected through a literature review of secondary information sources: bibliographic and hemerographic, as well as in-depth interviews with five owners of artisanal and agricultural subsistence businesses.

Faced with uncertainty, artisanal and agricultural subsistence businesses have adopted innovative and proactive survival practices. The closure of markets, the absence of tourism, the suspension of non-essential activities, the lack of mobility and transportation, and the closure of access in rural communities are some of the realities these businesses are experiencing. Subsistence businesses in marginalised areas are a long way from accessing information technologies for online sales and home deliveries, which are implemented by most businesses in urban areas. In contrast, they revert to ancestral marketing practices such as bartering and low prices to earn an income for family food. Despite the loss of over 50% of subsistence businesses in urban and semi-urban areas, online sales through social media and websites, socially responsible initiatives, along with government support programmes, have helped others stay in business.

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.

This paper is in three parts about the market factor in contingency theory: (1) We focus on the dual structure of markets; the internal structure of relations among producers vs. the external structure of buying and selling with other markets. We use a network model to describe the association between performance and the dual structure of American markets from 1963 to 1992. (2) We reverse-engineer the network model to infer the “effective” level of competition among producers in each market. Effective competition, a measure of competitve intensity, is inferred from observed market profits predicted by the market network of dependence on other sectors of the economy. Producers with profit margins higher than expected from observed market structure must face an “effective” level of competition lower than the level implied by the observed structure. Instead of predicting peformance from internal and external market structure, we use data on performance and external structre (the more reliable and detailed data) to infer internal structure. (3) We demonstrate the research value of the effective competition variable for its relaiability (illustrated by automatic adjustment for the exogenous shock of imports in 1982), its accuracy (illustrated by revealing the contingent value of a strong corporate culture inKotter & Heskett's, 1992, study), and as a market factor integrating case with comparative research. We close discussing the market conditions measured by effective competition, which, as an unobserved variable, is more subject than observed variables to misinterpretation.

In the academic field of business management, several potential theories were established during the last decades to explain companies' decisions, organizational behavior, consumer patterns, and internationalization, among others. As a result, businesses and scholars were able to analyze and decide based on theoretical approaches to explain the current conditions of the market. Secondary research was conducted to collect more than 36 management theories. This chapter aims to develop the most famous theories related to business applied in the international field. The novelty of this chapter relies on the compilation of recognized previous research studies from the academic literature and evidence in international business.

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.

Woodward's seminal research linking technology to optimal organizational form presented a contingent theory of managerial structure that, in effect, presented the organizational version of scientific management. Taylorism addressed individual work processes; Woodward's theory addressed organizational structural processes; deviations from optimized processes or systems reduced effectiveness. The very nature of contingency theory, however, relies on the implicit assumption that the production technology of the organization is the primary mechanism by which the firm generates value. In the case of the biotechnology and social networking firms, the underlying production technology and organizational structure are intermediaries to value creation, not production technologies per se.