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This chapter offers a template for examining the rigor and validity ideals in international business survey research. It provides (1) observations on how research-quality checks are currently used, and (2) recommendations about prerequisites for their use. These recommendations are based on the idea that the ideal of rigor and validity is not absolute and cannot be achieved by ad-hoc checks. We argue that there must be certain linkages and progression in attempting higher quality in survey research. We propose a hierarchy of stipulations to strive for highest validity and rigor goal, which we entitle commensurability. As such, this framework outlines the different steps which need to be examined progressively to approach commensurability.

Entrepreneurship remains a young scholarly discipline characterized by low paradigmatic development. Herein, we discuss theoretical and methodological issues associated with this rapidly emerging yet still developing research area. We argue that theory and methodology are symbiotic components of research and should develop concurrently in order to support the evolution of a paradigm for entrepreneurship research. Further, we posit that effective growth of entrepreneurship research will occur as a result of appropriately extending theory and methods from other scholarly disciplines as well as from theoretical and methodological innovations that are unique to entrepreneurship. Based on the positions taken in this chapter, we also advance recommendations for scholars to consider as work is completed to develop a systematic body of knowledge about entrepreneurship.

We develop and validate measurement instruments for the business partner, watchdog, and scorekeeper roles of controllers. This study addresses calls to enhance the quality of survey research in management accounting by devoting more attention to scale development and especially to construct validity. By focusing on the activity sets of the controllers’ roles, we provide a theoretically and empirically grounded picture of their current roles. The measurement instruments presented in this study enable systematic research progress on controller roles, their relationships, antecedents, and performance outcomes.

Since the publication of Venkatraman and Grant's (1986) article two decades ago, considerably more attention has been directed at establishing the validity of constructs in the strategy literature. However, recent developments in measurement theory indicate that strategy researchers need to pay additional attention to whether their constructs should be modeled as having formative or reflective indicators. Therefore, the purpose of this chapter is to highlight the differences between formative and reflective indicator measurement models, and discuss the potential role of formative measurement models in strategy research. First, we systematically review the literature on construct measurement model specification. Second, we assess the extent of measurement model misspecification in the recent strategy literature. Our assessment of 257 constructs in the contemporary strategy literature suggests that many important strategy constructs are more appropriately modeled as having formative indicators than as having reflective indicators. Based on this review, we identify some common errors leading to measurement model misspecification in the strategy domain. Finally, we discuss some implications of our analyses for scholars in the strategic management field.

We investigate whether active involvement of private equity firms in their portfolio companies during the holding period of a later-stage private equity investment is related to increased levels in operating performance of these companies. Our analysis of unique survey data on 267 European buyouts and secondary performance data on 29 portfolio companies using partial least squares structural equation modeling indicates that private equity firms, that is, their board representatives, can increase operating performance not only by monitoring the behavior of top managers of portfolio companies, but also by becoming involved in strategic decisions and supporting top managers through the provision of strategic resources. Strategic resources, in particular expertise and networks, provided by private equity firm representatives in the form of financial and strategic involvement are associated with increases in the financial performance and competitive prospects of portfolio companies. Operational involvement, however, is not related to changes in operating performance. In addition to empirical insights into the different types of involvement and their effects, this chapter contributes to the buyout literature by providing support for the suggested broadening of the theoretical discussion beyond the dominant perspective of agency theory through developing and testing a complementary resource-based view of involvement. This allows taking into account not only the monitoring, but also the more entrepreneurial supporting element of involvement by private equity firms.

Both the theory and practice of corporate social responsibility (CSR) are foundational to the field of Business & Society (B&S). However, efforts to define and operationalize this construct have been undermined by definitional discord arising from the disparate sense-making assumptions and methods of competing North American and European research traditions. Scholars wedded to the North American research tradition have striven mightily to uncover “objective” evidence in support of the instrumental proposition that IF corporate executives were to invest more resources to enhance social and environmental performance, THEN the firm’s burnished brand image, reputation, and perceived legitimacy would elevate the firm’s long-term financial performance as well. However, the inconclusive statistical record has failed to move many corporate decision makers beyond the minimal social and environmental investments needed to create the impression of compliance with societal expectations. The proliferation of corporate scandals and the pattern of settling legal disputes without admitting guilt are also troubling. The muted impact of B&S research based on proving the instrumental proposition has prompted a new generation of European B&S scholars to explore the sense-making potential of the European research tradition, which seeks meaning and normative validity within a pluralist crucible of community discourse. This contested communicative space is filled with paradoxical tensions and contending stakeholder voices and narratives. With respect to CSR, this discursive sense-making process is animated by an aspiration toward constructing shared meanings that can guide a search for more collaborative approaches to addressing systemic challenges via stakeholder engagement and experiments in multisector collaborative problem-solving. Rather than try to scientifically “prove” a fact-based pre-existing condition, this approach embraces “an emergent and mediated form of strategic ambiguity” to keep open the possibility of “fulfilling often conflicting instrumental and social/ethical imperatives at the same time” (Guthey & Morsing, 2014, p. 556). This discourse-based search for shared meanings in support of a convergence of economic, social, and environmental values frames CSR as an aspirational cocreative process rather than as a pyramid of normative assertions loosely grounded on a search for validation in efforts to find correlations (or causation) within an assortment of “objective” facts. The discursive approach to constructing CSR also highlights the relevance of the emergence of institutional innovations that enable network interactions to address shared systemic problems. Ultimately, CSR may be expressed as a form of network governance seeking to assure the sustainable outcome of system health and vitality across micro-, meso-, and meta-levels of thought and action.

Social movement scholars use protest events as a way to quantify social movements and have most often used large, national newspapers to identify those events. This has introduced known and unknown biases into our measurement of social movements. We know that national newspapers tend to cover larger and more contentious events and organizations. Protest events are furthermore a small part of what social movements actually do. Without other readily available options to quantify social movements, however, big-N studies have continued to focus on protest events via a few large newspapers. With advances in digitized data and computational methods, we now no longer have to rely on large newspapers or focus only on protests to quantify important aspects of social movements. In this paper, we use the environmental movement as a case study, analyzing data from a wide range of local, regional, and national newspapers in the United States to quantify multiple facets of social movements. We argue that the incorporation of more data and new methods to quantify information in text has the potential to transform the way we both conceive of and measure social movements in three ways: (1) the type of focal social movement organization included, (2) the type of tactics and issues covered, and (3) the ability to go beyond protest events as the primary unit of analysis. In addition to demonstrating ways that the focus on counting protest events has introduced specific biases in the type of tactics, issues, and organizations covered in social movement research, we argue that computational methods can help us extract and count meaningful aspects of social movements well beyond event counts. In short, the infusion of new data and methods into social movements, peace, and conflict studies could lead us to a substantial shift in the way we quantify social movements, from protest events to everything that occurs outside of them.

Theorists often point to social theory's normativity, but Gouldner's later works provide the most explicit, comprehensive treatment of it as post-traditional normative discourse – a practice distinct from sociology and sociological theory, yet linked historically and analytically to them. His argument about the need for a discourse space to debate social science's normative directions and to strengthen its connections to civil society is relevant today. Because Gouldner's approach has gaps and is somewhat fragmented I will reconstruct his argument about social theory per se. Although I point to problems that derive from his incomplete pragmatic turn, his approach offers an excellent departure point for discussing the meaning of social theory.

One of the major conceptual dilemmas of international management has been issue of the liability of foreignness. The multinational enterprise (MNE), as it expands internationally, faces two fundamental problems: does it continue to do abroad what it does well at home, or does it change its approach to adapt to the differing conditions in its new markets? Additionally, the option of changing its approach confronts a major constraint: how to cover the costs of organizational complexity brought on by multinationality. Together, these problems and this constraint imply that multinationals face complexity and strategic-fit costs that quickly overwhelm the gains from economies of scale and scope that are derived from moving abroad into what are, for them, new markets. We know by the fact that multinationals exist and thrive that they are able to overcome these concerns. However, the question of why and how remains something of a mystery, although one we can conceptually work around this with a bit of theoretical and semantic legerdemain.