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The increasing importance of corporate social responsibility in recent years has been largely discussed, mainly as a part of business strategies to cope with growing environmental challenges. Discourses regarding corporate social responsibility intensified with the emergence of financial crisis. Many of these debates refer to the role CSR plays in society and reasons for a company to involve in supporting social causes in times of crisis.

We study the events that motivate CEOs to underinvest in R&D long-term projects (CEO myopia). Based on the existing literature in earnings management and agency theory, myopia is likely to become more problematic under five circumstances: when the CEO nears retirement (the CEO horizon problem), R&D projects have very long time horizons (the project horizon problem), the firm’s financial health is deteriorating (the cover-up problem), ownership structure is heavily weighted toward insider owners (minority owner oppression problem), and when the threat of hostile takeover increases (the entrenchment problem). We setup a dynamic simulation model in which rational CEOs maximize the total value of their bonus compensation over their tenure. Our findings related to the five circumstances are consistent with the extant literature. However, we found an unexpected stable, nonlinear (inverted U-shaped) relationship between CEO tenure and R&D investment. We discuss the theoretical implications of our model and offer suggestions for future research.

The purpose of this paper is to re-evaluate the sustainable attitude-behavior gap by reconsidering the cognitive-rational aspects of consumer purchase behavior. We aim to show how companies can benefit from focusing on hedonic aspects of consumption in their marketing of sustainable products. We claim that consumer culture research needs to examine the link between hedonic, aesthetic, and cognitive-rational aspects of sustainable consumption.

We use the electric vehicle marketing strategy in the United States as an example of an approach to bridge the attitude-behavior gap. More specifically, we focus on the car manufacturer Tesla as an example of marketing a sustainable product.

We find that Tesla’s marketing strategy focuses on aesthetics and hedonics-ludic performance. Similarly to other luxury cars, Tesla markets itself with a full compliment of consumer benefits. Compared to economical electric vehicles, sustainability is not the primary focus of Tesla’s marketing communication strategy.

Sustainable consumption theory benefits from examining the interlinking of hedonic, aesthetic and cognitive-rational aspects product purchasing and use. Future research in the development of sustainable consumption theory in additional complex product categories is needed.

Greater regard for consumer experience in sustainable consumption offers the potential for additional strategies to bridge the attitude-behavior gap and marketing of sustainable goods.

We move beyond the attitude-behavior gap by not only focusing on expressed attitudes of sustainability, but also focusing on the hedonic aspects at play in sustainable consumption.

For the last several decades, technology has been playing an important role in changing the lives of consumers with an unexpected speed of innovative developments. Most of them were disruptive and had shaped not only the behaviour of consumers, but also empowered them to search for better products and services. These changes took place in media, communication, and information management of socialisation and collaboration. The digitisation revolution is a continuum until people and machines embrace a common ground for improving the lives of consumers. There were three stages of this movement. In the first stage, Turkish perspective was in alignment with the world where new channels of communication were established with support of Internet and information management. Marketing technology tools such as customer relationship management and call centre systems were discovered. In the second stage, continuous learning from the best uses and implementations has started. The ultimate goal became total customer satisfaction. Many improvements and innovative services, such as omni-channel marketing, took place for achieving this goal. Today, in the third stage, new marketing tools are being developed on the basis of integrated machine learning, such as analysis of customer conciseness, prediction of behaviour and perceptive marketing, which will be used extensively through digital platforms, new media, social web and in everyday devices for targeted marketing. In this chapter, a broader look is taken and an explanation is made for what has happened through these periods of intersection of marketing science and information technology. Moreover, ongoing changes which have given a new impetus to consumer life are addressed with respect to marketing management literature.

The study here responds to the view that the crucial problem in strategic management (research) is firm heterogeneity – why firms adopt different strategies and structures, why heterogeneity persists, and why competitors perform differently. The present study applies complexity theory tenets and a “neo-configurational perspective” of Misangyi et al. (2016) in proposing complex antecedent conditions affecting complex outcome conditions. Rather than examining variable directional relationships using null hypotheses statistical tests, the study examines case-based conditions using somewhat precise outcome tests (SPOT). The complex outcome conditions include firms with high financial performances in declining markets and firms with low financial performances in growing markets – the study focuses on seemingly paradoxical outcomes. The study here examines firm strategies and outcomes for separate samples of cross-sectional data of manufacturing firms with headquarters in one of two nations: Finland (n = 820) and Hungary (n = 300). The study includes examining the predictive validities of the models. The study contributes conceptual advances of complex firm orientation configurations and complex firm performance capabilities configurations as mediating conditions between firmographics, firm resources, and the two final complex outcome conditions (high performance in declining markets and low performance in growing markets). The study contributes by showing how fuzzy-logic computing with words (Zadeh, 1966) advances strategic management research toward achieving requisite variety to overcome the theory-analytic mismatch pervasive currently in the discipline (Fiss, 2007, 2011) – thus, this study is a useful step toward solving the crucial problem of how to explain firm heterogeneity.

The essential investments in new product development (NPD) made by industrial companies entail effective management of NPD activities. In this context, performance measurement is one of the means that can be employed in the pursuit of effectiveness.

This chapter presents a personal research journey starting from my interest in firms’ decision-making within the tradition of the behavioral theory of the firm to discovering mergers and acquisitions (M&A) as an ideal decision context to advance the theory. Using my two articles published in the Academy of Management Journal as examples, I showcase how to leverage the specific attributes of M&A together with the institutional context in which they occur to develop and test new theories. Each paper addresses a distinctive research question and provides a unique angle of theoretical insights to the theory of decision-making. In particular, I was able to dig deeper into the mechanisms of institutional logic, power, and coalition building for explaining how firms make strategic decisions, all owing to the significance and versatility of M&A.