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Research in entrepreneurship is increasingly exploring how archetypes, taxonomies, typologies, and configurations can help scholars understand complex entrepreneurial phenomena. We illustrate the potential for set-theoretic methods to inform this literature by offering best practices regarding how qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) can be used to explore research questions of interest to entrepreneurship scholars. Specifically, we introduce QCA, document how this approach has been used in management research, and provide step-by-step guidance to empower scholars to use this family of methods. We put a particular emphasis on the analytical procedures and offer solutions to dealing with potential pitfalls when using QCA-based methods and highlight opportunities for future entrepreneurship research.

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is a promising, powerful method that is increasingly used for IS research. However, the Information Systems (IS) discipline still lacks a shared understanding of how to conduct and report QCA. This paper introduces the fundamental concepts of QCA, summarizes the status quo, and derives recommendations for future research.

A descriptive literature review in major IS outlets summarizes how and why QCA has been used in the IS discipline, critically evaluates the status quo, and derives recommendations for future QCA studies.

The literature review reveals 32 empirical research articles in major IS journals that have used the QCA method. Articles applied QCA to a broad range of research topics at the individual and organizational levels, mainly as a standalone analysis for theory development, elaboration and testing. The authors also provide evidence that most published IS research articles do not take full advantage of the potential QCA, such as analyzing necessary causal conditions or testing the robustness of QCA results. The authors provide seven actionable recommendations for future IS research using QCA.

The literature review assesses the status quo of QCA’s application in the IS discipline and provides specific recommendations on how IS researchers can leverage the full potential of QCA.

The purpose of this paper is to provide comprehensive mapping of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) applications in business and management research and to examine the sub-fields of corporate governance research in this context.

Through a systematic literature review of 22 articles, the paper describes and analyses how QCA is used in the corporate governance field, what can be learned from the methodology’s implementation in corporate governance studies and why authors justify its use.

The findings highlight that QCA in corporate governance is still at an early stage of development. The paper encourages governance scholars to use this method to transform QCA from a niche into a mainstream method because it is appropriate for understanding both complex phenomena of social reality and issues of corporate governance that require an approach able to capture configurations of conditions, asymmetric patterns and equifinal explanations.

This is the first complete overview of the existing literature concerning QCA’s application in corporate governance research and reveals implications for its future use. In this way, it extends the previous work on QCA’s benefits to management researchers and other critical reviews of applications in QCA. This study encourages scholars to renew their understanding of corporate governance issues through a new analysis method that can help to discover conceptual and empirical relations among case-oriented and variable-oriented analyses in terms of interrelations to examine corporate governance practices holistically.

The purpose of this paper is to critically reflect and offer insights on how to justify the use of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) as a research method for understanding the complexity of organizational phenomena, by applying the principles of the neo-configurational approach.

We present and critically examine three arguments regarding the use of QCA for management research. First, they discuss the need to assume configurational theories to build and empirically test a causal model of interest. Second, we explain how the three principles of causal complexity are assumed during the process of conducting QCA-based studies. Third, we elaborate on the importance of case knowledge when selecting the data for the analysis and when interpreting the results.

We argue that it is important to reflect on these arguments to have an appropriate research design. In the true spirit of the configurational approach, we contend that the three arguments presented are necessary; however, each argument is insufficient to warrant a QCA research design.

This paper contributes to management research by offering key arguments on how to justify the use of QCA-based studies in future research endeavors.

Purpose – This chapter examines the potential of qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) for strategy research.

Methodology/approach – We introduce the set-theoretic framework of QCA and provide an overview of recent methodological developments.

Findings – We utilize a variety of examples relevant to strategy research to illustrate the action steps and key concepts involved in conducting a QCA study.

Originality/value of paper – We develop examples from core research areas in strategic management to illustrate QCA's potential for examining issues of causality and diversity in strategy research, and in settings involving medium-N samples. We conclude by emphasizing that QCA offers an alternative mode of inquiry to open and redirect important lines of strategy research.

Because family businesses are highly complex enterprises, researchers need appropriate theoretical and methodological tools to study them. The neoconfigurational perspective and its accompanying method, qualitative comparative analysis, are particularly well suited to phenomena characterized by complex causality, but their uptake in family business research has been slow and fragmented. To remedy this, the authors highlight their unique ability to address research questions for which other approaches are not well suited and discuss how they might be applied to family business phenomena.

The authors introduce the core tenets of the neoconfigurational perspective and how its set-theoretic epistemology differs from traditional approaches to theorizing and analysis. The authors then use a dataset of family firms to present a primer on conducting qualitative comparative analysis and interpreting the results.

The authors find that family firm resources can be combined in multiple ways to affect business survival, suggesting that resources are substitutable and complementary. The authors discuss how the unique features of the neoconfigurational approach, namely equifinality, conjunctural causation and causal asymmetry, can be fruitfully applied to break new ground in scholarly understanding of family businesses.

This article allows family business researchers to apply the neoconfigurational approach without first having to consult multiple and disparate sources often written for other disciplines. This article explicates how to leverage the theoretical and empirical advantages of the neoconfigurational approach in the context of family businesses, supporting a more widespread adoption of the neoconfigurational perspective in family business research.

The aim of this chapter is to introduce a methodology that enables researchers to employ a set of systematic comparative tools and techniques in their multiple case study research that allow them to move from drawing loose comparisons towards a more formalised type of analysis, while simultaneously paying attention to within-case complexities. This methodology stands between the qualitative and the quantitative methods and helps researchers to build middle-range theories (Mjoset, 2001) from small to intermediate numbers of cases. This methodology encompasses a number of techniques including crisp and fuzzy set-theoretic qualitative comparative analyses, which have been used in a wide range of social science disciplines. However, these techniques have not received sufficient attention from higher education scholars.

Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA), initiated by Charles C. Ragin, is a research strategy with distinctive added value for organization studies. QCA constitutes in essence two configurational approaches, each grounded in set theory. One approach uses crisp-sets (dichotomous variables) to analyze cases. The other approach uses fuzzy-sets. While the use of fuzzy-sets has been increasing over the last few years, the crisp-set (csQCA) approach is still used in a majority of empirical applications. This chapter discusses in-depth the application of csQCA in organization studies. This chapter starts with a stylized presentation of two dominant research strategies, case-based research and variable-based research, and how csQCA relates to them. Subsequently, csQCA is further introduced and the different applications in organization studies are discussed. This section ends with a brief step-wise “how to” presentation. The chapter then turns to a presentation of the main distinctive strengths of the approach. In the final part, the chapter discusses extensively the main criticisms which have been raised with regard to (cs)QCA and draws out some of the main implications of this discussion.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) to the field of supply chain management and provide a detailed roadmap that supply chain researchers can utilize when applying this methodology.

Data collection focused on the evaluation of product returns management practices as perceived by business customers who operate in a supplier–customer context. In order to analyze the data using the QCA approach, a multi-step analysis was developed.

The results indicate five solutions that lead to high levels of customer satisfaction. The existence of multiple sufficient configurations for customer satisfaction indicates equifinality because multiple alternative solutions can lead to the same outcome.

The authors make a methodological contribution by applying the QCA method to the field of supply chain management and providing a detailed roadmap that supply chain researchers can utilize.

The authors provide managers five different and novel combinations of antecedents that lead to higher levels of customer satisfaction.

This study offers supply chain researchers a better understanding of when it is appropriate to use QCA and how to apply this methodology. From a theoretical perspective, past studies focused exclusively on the “net effects” of these antecedents, thus, did not capture the complexity of the relationships between these various antecedents and customer satisfaction. This is a noteworthy contribution as it highlights the complexity of the amalgam of relationships and factors that impact customer satisfaction within the context of reverse supply chain.

Although QCA was originally developed specifically for small-N settings, recent studies have shown its potential for large-N organization studies. In this chapter, we provide guidance to prospective researchers with the goal of opening up QCA’s potential for widespread use in organization studies involving large-N settings, both as an alternative and as a complement to conventional regression analyses. We compare small-N and large-N QCA with respect to theoretical assumptions and objectives, processes and decisions involved in building the causal model, selecting the sample, as well as analyzing the data and interpreting the results. Finally, we discuss the prospects for large-N configurational analysis in organization studies and related fields going forward.