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Purpose – We introduce the concept of a brand biography to describe an emerging trend in branding in which firms author a dynamic, historical account of the events that have shaped the brand over time. Using a particular type of brand biography, “the underdog,” we empirically show how managers can strategically use brand biographies in brand positioning, in this case to mitigate the curse of success. As brands grow and become successful, they are often marked by the negative stigma associated with size and power, which elicits anticorporate sentiment from consumers. An underdog brand biography can be strategically wielded to prevent or offset anticorporate backlash stemming from consumers’ negative perceptions of firms’ size and/or market power.

Methodology/approach – Lab experiments.

Findings – We find an underdog effect: consumers like and prefer brands with underdog brand biographies because they identify with them. We show that an underdog brand biography can mitigate the curse of success by making large firms more attractive to consumers.

Practical implications – Firms can use brand biographies to weave compelling narratives about their brands that help protect them from negative consumer attitudes and actions.

Originality/value of the chapter – Extant branding theory has a dearth of theoretical constructs and frameworks that allow for the dynamism and evolution of brands over time. Through our observation and study of emerging marketplace branding practices, we have identified a new construct, the brand biography, to complement existing theoretical frameworks for understanding brand meaning.

This chapter explores how challenges potentially encourage refugees to engage in entrepreneurial activities and which adaptive mechanisms they employ in order to overcome the challenges. Semi-structured interviews with 12 refugee entrepreneurs were conducted in order to understand the underlying processes of the dynamics of challenges and adaptive mechanism within which the entrepreneurial outcomes emerged. The empirical findings of the study are evaluated in line with the parameters of the challenge-based model of entrepreneurship. A more nuanced picture of underdog entrepreneurs emerges along with a deeper understanding of the entrepreneurial activities of refugees.

Purpose – This chapter examines the process of radicalization, deradicalization, and support for intelligence agencies in a few well-known cases of terrorists who turned into informants.

Methodology/Approach – Five cases studies are utilized to demonstrate the process of engagement in, disengagement from, and revolt against terrorist groups. Existing literature on radicalization and deradicalization is set against the context of these case studies.

Findings – By drawing upon the experiences of terrorists who turned into informants, it is possible to prove theories on radicalization and deradicalization. In particular, the process of cognitive radicalization presumes that extremist beliefs can also be rejected (deradicalization), while the process of behavioral radicalization presumes that terrorists can distance themselves from extremist behaviors (disengagement).

Originality/Value – Scholarship has traditionally focused on “underdogs” of all kinds, with a less keen interest in elites or the actors operating on their behalf. The work of informants has often remained in a dimly lit corner of academic research. This chapter helps illuminate the path undertaken by terrorists who become informants for Western security apparatus.

In various settings (e.g., political elections, marketing campaigns), competing groups attempt to disseminate messages that promote different viewpoints. Moreover, these groups often differ substantially in the resources they have available for promotion, which may generate inequities in the reach of their messages. With a series of computer simulations, the author investigates the role that social network structure plays in perpetuating or mitigating the inequalities in reach brought about by asymmetric access to resources. The author models such asymmetric access by varying the number of "seeds” available to disseminators (i.e., places in the social network from where their messages begin spreading). The author finds that long ties – links that connect otherwise distant regions of a social network – help to decrease the disparities in dissemination brought about by asymmetric access to seeds. The author shows that this finding generalizes to different assumptions about the proportion of long ties present, the seeding asymmetry, and the rate that messages spread, and argues that information and communication technologies like Facebook and Twitter can foster dissemination equality by prioritizing interactions across long ties.

Behavioral strategy completes the analyses of superior profitability by highlighting how non-economic, behavioral barriers generate an alternative source of strategic opportunities. Existing internal and external analysis frameworks fail to explain why strategic factors can be systematically mispriced and why large firms’ structural and resource advantage are regularly disrupted by entrepreneurs. We argue that the systematic biases documented in the behavioral and organizational sciences in fact illuminate an alternative source of competitive advantage. Strategists could develop superior insights into the value of resources and recognize factors that are either under- or overvalued while competitors remain blind to such possibilities. Our argument is illustrated by how three “underdogs” disrupted the incumbents in their industries by exploiting rivals’ predictable biases and blind spots. We conclude by discussing how our ideas can be generalized as an alternative, behavioral approach for strategy.

The Greek debt crisis (2009–2018) was an event that received unprecedented media attention worldwide. The media reproduced a highly negative image of Greece, addressing the crisis in exceptionalist terms, usually under a moralistic and culturalist explanatory framework. Drawing on earlier research, this chapter focusses on the culturalist discourses developed by popular Greek mainstream news media, of conservative and liberal political orientation, such as Kathimerini, Athens Voice and Protagon.gr. Through what is understood as a ‘self-orientalising’ process, such media tend to reproduce the neo-orientalist hegemonic crisis and austerity discursive construction, as enunciated by the EU's political and economic establishment. Under this lens, austerity emerges as a modernising project that would presumably correct Greece's irregularities and would make Greece European and economically competitive for global capitalism. The period studied concerns the years of the crisis between 2010 and 2015. The analysis discloses the classist underpinnings of such discursive repertoires and their antipolitical and antidemocratic character. The analysis also discusses the disciplinary effects of such media practices, which mystify austerity and the processes of expropriation it unfolds, and passivises civic culture, and counterhegemonic resistances, by promoting a collective ‘self-bashing’ strategy.

This study examines the connections between subculture theory, symbolic interaction and the work of David Matza with a special focus on exploring alcohol consumption by young adults in the UK. We apply Matza ideas of the “techniques of neutralization,” “subterranean values,” and “drift” within an ethnographic study on alcohol to suggest that young people's “calculated hedonism” can be understood as a strategy of agency in the context of a subcultural setting. This article adds to the literature of symbolic interaction, subculture and the discipline of sociology by critically focusing on the work of David Matza from its reception in the 1960s to today as a central element of the new paradigm of cultural criminology. For us the sociological imagination is “alive and well” through Matza's advocacy of naturalism whereby he sought to integrate the work Chicago School under Park and Burgess with his assessment of the so-called Neo-Chicago School. In the literature Matza's work is often defined as symbolic interactionist we see his ambition in a wider sense of wanting sociology to recover human struggle and the active creation of meaning. Our approach is to understand the calculated hedonism of young adult use of alcohol through their humanity.