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In this chapter, I draw from theory and research on intergroup relations and decoupling to critique prevailing conceptions of behavioral strategy, and then propose a viable alternative. I suggest that prevailing definitions of behavioral strategy exclude or marginalize theoretical perspectives that should logically be included, which has (1) created undesirable ingroup/outgroup dynamics in the strategy field and (2) resulted in decoupling between behavioral strategy as defined by category leaders and the actual content of research conducted by category members. I contend that this state of affairs has likely reduced the impact of behavioral strategy on other disciplines, and also likely constrained its impact on non-academic audiences. As an alternative, I propose a more interdisciplinary approach that involves identifying behavioral mechanisms that explain how social and psychological processes at different levels of analysis interact and interrelate to affect strategy and performance.

This paper reflects on the evolution of implicit and explicit behavioral ideas in the field of strategic management using Herbert Simon’s scholarship as a starting point, that is, his emphasis on empirically driven; interdisciplinary theorizing allowing and enabling two-way street learning. We argue that historically, there were plenty of behavioral ideas embedded in the field and, together with the recent movement towards explicit “behavioral strategy,” these provide several possible paths for future developments in strategic management research. In the spirit of broadening the tent for behavioral strategy in the future (Hambrick & Crossland, 2018), we suggest some topics and approaches for behavioral strategy in empirically driven, interdisciplinary directions which allows also for two-way street learning between concepts and real-world strategic phenomena.

We return to the problem that motivated the original behavioral theory of the firm, price adjustment, but from the standpoint of post-Carnegie School perspectives on cognition, attention, and routines. Whereas work in the Carnegie School tradition has tended to develop models of firms in opposition to economic theory, we seek to understand how economic ideas are used to shape decision processes. Using a combination of interview, observational, and archival data gathered at a large manufacturing firm that produced parts to maintain machinery, we develop a behaviorally plausible story of how organizations shape price adjustment. We follow three successive waves of managers seeking to improve the pricing routines through shifting attentional perspective, managing attentional engagement, and structuring attentional execution. We demonstrate how managers redesign routines to shape cognition and attention, thereby developing greater coherence in the market representations of the sales force. Our findings show how reshaping cognition and attention in pricing routines can improve organizational intelligence in pricing decisions. Economists treat markets as the ideal – the best that can be imagined – and organizations as second-best options – the best that can be achieved, but our findings invert the story, suggesting that in modern market economies, organizations and routines are essential to making the price system work.

This double volume presents the state of the art in research on the microfoundations of institutions. In this introductory chapter, we develop an overview of where the emerging microfoundational agenda in institutional theory stands and in which direction it is moving. We discuss the questions of what microfoundations of institutions are, what the “micro” in microfoundations represents, why we use the plural form (microfoundations vs microfoundation), why microfoundations of institutions are needed, and how microfoundations can be studied. Specifically, we highlight that there are several traditions of microfoundational research, and we outline a cognitive, a communicative and a behavioral perspective. In addition, we explain that scholars tend to think of microfoundations in terms of an agency, levels, or mechanisms argument. We delineate key challenges and opportunities for future research and explain why we believe that the debate on microfoundations will become a defining element in the further development of institutional theory.

By theorizing choice as an information and decision problem, behavioral strategy research has not considered fully the agentic capacities of strategists. We argue that agentic capacities are distinct from decision-making and information-processing capacities as they rest on temporally anchored engagements with the world through habit, imagination, and judgment. We propose that understanding agency as temporally anchored action capacities is particularly important for research in behavioral strategy, as strategic phenomena encompass accumulated experience and path-dependencies (the past), ongoing competitive, market, and organizational interactions and exchanges (the present), and plans, visions, and forecasts for the future (the future). We outline how strategic choice and agency involve cognitive engagement in the three time horizons through distinct cognitive capabilities and the organizational processes that support them.

Entrepreneurship is a prominent area of inquiry which is enriched by an ample literature base and challenged by definitional deficiencies. Over the years, multiple perspectives of entrepreneurship have emerged and a holistic approach to entrepreneurship has been proposed. This can facilitate the continued enlargement of the entrepreneurship field and allow for interdisciplinary research within the African region. This chapter contributes to the literature on entrepreneurship in developing economies by providing an extensive review of the various approaches that entrepreneurship has been conceptualised. Nine themes are explored: the great person, economic perspective, psychological perspective, sociological perspective, behavioural perspective, management, intrapreneurship, cognitive perspective and leadership perspective. This is followed by an examination of entrepreneurship as a process, as a new venture creation and as an art of opportunity recognition and exploitation. In the last section of this chapter, a clarion call is made for more African scholarship and research in the field of entrepreneurship.

Global Mindset (GM) is a multifaceted construct that has received broad interest among practitioners and academics. It is a fragmented construct at this point in time, due to definitional overlap with other constructs such as global leadership and cultural intelligence. This overlap has created complexity for research that attempts to understand GM in isolation. Lack of clear boundaries in defining and conceptualizing this construct challenges researchers who are attempting to capture fully what constitutes GM. Our work seeks to better understand and explain what underlines the individual GM construct and how does this impact the development of global competencies in individual managers.

We systematically review and analyze the individual GM literature thematically to provide an overview of the extant research from a broad array of scholarly sources dating from 1994 to 2017. Our work offers a thematic analysis that provides a visual guide to GM by tracking the corpus of individual-level GM studies. We categorize the research according to its theoretical groundings and basic concepts and proceed review how GM has been operationalized at the individual level and measured. Next, we integrate major dimensions in the GM research and propose a framework to enhance understanding of the phenomenon. Finally, we discuss the implications of our review for the development of GM for practitioners, coaches and trainers.

Certain elements of Hayek’s work are prominent precursors to the modern field of complex adaptive systems, including his ideas on spontaneous order, his focus on market processes, his contrast between designing and gardening, and his own framing of complex systems. Conceptually, he was well ahead of his time, prescient in his formulation of novel ways to think about economies and societies. Technically, the fact that he did not mathematically formalize most of the notions he developed makes his insights hard to incorporate unambiguously into models. However, because so much of his work is divorced from the simplistic models proffered by early mathematical economics, it stands as fertile ground for complex systems researchers today. I suggest that Austrian economists can create a progressive research program by building models of these Hayekian ideas, and thereby gain traction within the economics profession. Instead of mathematical models the suite of techniques and tools known as agent-based computing seems particularly well-suited to addressing traditional Austrian topics like money, business cycles, coordination, market processes, and so on, while staying faithful to the methodological individualism and bottom-up perspective that underpin the entire school of thought.

This chapter aims to identify integrated marketing communication (IMC) in the context of business to business to consumer (B2B2C) and empirically test a number of hypotheses related to the selected constructs. A model of the IMC was tested in a survey conducted among stakeholders in the selected field. Professionals responsible for communication and branding activities need to evaluate the relative contributions of the IMC in the B2B2C perspective.