Arch G. Woodside

Boston College | BC · Marketing

The study here applies complexity causation tenets and uses abductive case-based modeling methods to refine prior theoretical advances in assessing the impacts of alternative configurations of trust-forms (i.e., calculative, cognitive trust, and affective trust on behavioral trust and buyer firm's assessments of mature-relationship strategy and fin...

Applying complexity theory tenets, this cross‐cultural study proposes and empirically examines generalizable, asymmetric, case outcome models of consumers who respond extremely negatively to luxury and mass fashion brands that they judge to be acting socially irresponsibly—and separately, consumers who do not engage in such responses—among separate...

Integrating the behavioral theory of the firm into the discussion on why firms behave in socially responsible ways, the study here develops and empirically tests hypotheses articulating when and how past corporate financial performance (CFP) might lead to more or less engagement in corporate social responsibility (CSR). Rather than treating histori...

Purpose – This article explores the processes, antecedents, and outcome of the concept of trust climate in online negotiations through synchronous video conferencing between international buyers and sellers. Design/methodology/approach – By grounding the concept of trust climate in three complementary theories, and by drawing on the findings of pr...

Amidst the 2019/22 COVID-19 miseries, a silver lining appears: the pandemic is causing many of us rethink our lives. Using terror management theory (TMT), this conceptual essay identifies the simultaneous emergence of two mindsets, a cautious mindset, stemming from the preservation motive, and a “virtuous” mindset, stemming from an enrichment motiv...

Amidst the catastrophe of COVID-19, segments of the population globally experienced changes in their perspectives on life and the desire to live a more fulfilling life. The study here examines this emergent trend with secondary data available as published survey reports and personal observations using the inductive-reflective method of understandin...

This study addresses a shortcoming in the transformational leadership literature (Van Knippenberg & Sitkin The Academy of Management Annals, 7(1), 1-60, 2013) by demonstrating when and how individual transformational leadership components may predict high and low team performance, as well as how these behaviors can combine to achieve certain outcom...

The increasing interest in fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) in Information Systems and marketing raises the need for a tutorial paper that discusses the basic concepts and principles of the method, provide answers to typical questions that editors, reviewers, and authors would have when dealing with a new tool of analysis, and pra...

This study examines the presence and impact of complex alternative organizational configurations of pricing on firm performance. The dataset is from a survey of company owners and company CEOs, of which a subsample was used previously and analyzed with multiple regression analysis. Analyzing an enlarged dataset that includes new data using fuzzy-se...

Low response rates are pointed as a critical problem in online travel surveys. Tourism researchers need to strive to find ways to increase response rates in order to improve the surveys’ coverage as well as representativeness. Through an experiment, this paper specifically examines the design factors that provide social clues in online survey, and...

In view of unprecedented severe impact of the COVID-19 on micro-, meso-, and macro-levels of the service sector around the world, the Service Industries Journal initiated this special issue, approaching from transformative service research perspective (TSR) to address the issues associated with this pandemic and identify remedies and business recov...

This essay applies the “ultimate broadening of the concept of marketing” for designing and implementing interventions in public laws and policy, national and local regulations, and everyday lives of individuals. The ultimate broadening of the concept of marketing: Marketing is any activity, message, emotion, or behavior by someone, firm, organizati...

The theorization of emotion receives considerable attention in contemporary tourism literature. Remarkably, existing studies largely ignore the operationalization of emotion in tourism research. Drawing on extant knowledge from psychology, marketing, and tourism literatures, this article describes methodological and theoretical concerns and provide...

Purpose This précis on recent service breakdown prevention (SBP) theory and research advocates innovation organizational leadership and actions via business-to-organization (B-to-O) training focusing on how to manage face-to-face server-client encounters by designing/engaging in effective processes to achieve highly desirable outcomes. This researc...

This study investigated whether social networking site (SNS) marketing activities are helpful in improving sales in traditional markets. For this purpose, we applied customer equity drivers (value equity, brand equity, and relationship equity) to test whether SNS marketing activities improve the overall customer outcome. The influences of customer...

The study contributes a natural experiment on the impact of tourism destination visit dynamic on national financial well-being. The study tracks the weekly rate of change in lodging demand in a top-ten U.S. vacation destination by visitor count, the Myrtle Beach area (“Grand Strand”), South Carolina The study covers a fifteen-year period on the rel...

Purpose This study defines service breakdowns, service breakdown prevention, and “servicide” as they relate to service-dominant logic. The study reviews relevant relevant literature on these three topics. This study categorizes real-life examples into five levels of dramatic turns toward service degradations and breakdowns that range from customer...

Who are the knowledge workers perceiving high versus low location autonomy? Do these workers consistently select work environments to enhance their well-being or to enhance their productivity? The study here frames the causal conditions for answering these research questions for case outcomes in response to calls (Misangyi et al. 2017; Woodside 201...

This theoretical and empirical study applies complexity theory tenets to deepen understanding, explanation, and prediction of how configurations of national cultures and need motivations influence national entrepreneurial and innovation behavior and nations’ quality of life (QOL). Also, the study examines whether or not high national ethical behavi...

Applying complexity theory tenets, the study here provides a unique asymmetric modeling perspective for examining causal conditions indicating high (low) project management performance (PMP). Complexity theory tenets include (tenet 1) recognizing that the causal conditions resulting in high PMP frequently have different components (i.e., ingredient...

The traditional and still dominant logic among nearly all empirical positivist researchers in schools of management is to write symmetric (two directional) variable hypotheses (SVH), even though the same researchers formulate their behavioral theories at the case (typology) identification level. The behavioral theory of the firm (Cyert and March, A...

Firm’s operating contexts and asymmetric perspectives of success versus failure outcomes are two essential features typically absent in research on firms’ implemented strategies. The study here describes and provides examples of formal case-based models (i.e., constructing algorithms) of firms’ implemented strategies within several of 81 potential...

This study assesses customers’ assessments of place sustainability and place attractiveness of a large-scale traditional local market (TLM). The study proposes a general theory of antecedents and outcomes for customer assessments of place sustainability and place attractiveness for one category of TLM: a collection of many independent shops (e.g.,...

Why do firms engage in socially responsible activities? Prior discussion around this issue mainly applies a uniform conceptualization of corporate social responsibility (CSR) or focuses on distinct CSR activities. These perspectives are surprising given that firms respond to expectations of social responsibility through unique and often multifacete...

Applying complexity theory tenets, the study here contributes an asymmetric modeling perspective for examining resources orchestrations that indicate high (separately low) project management performance (PMP) accurately. Complexity theory tenets include recognizing that the causal conditions resulting in high PMP have different conditions (i.e., in...

Purpose This paper aims to apply complexity theory tenets to deepen understanding, explanation and prediction of how configurations of national cultures and need motivations influence national entrepreneurial and innovation behavior and nations’ quality-of-life (QOL). Also, the study examines whether or not high national ethical behavior is suffici...

Corrupt behavior presents major challenges for organizations in a wide range of settings. This article embraces a complexity theoretical perspective to elucidate the causal patterns of factors underlying consumers’ unethical judgments. This study examines how causal conditions of four distinct domains combine into configurational causes of unethica...

This study proposes and empirically examines a case-outcome configurational theory for explaining shoppers' demographic configurations and sustainability and place attractiveness assessments impact their behaviors toward culturally traditional mega-markets (CTMM). The empirical study here supports the case-outcome theory that recipes of (separate)...

This study describes the use of a true (not quasi or “natural”) field experiment to test the impact of a third-party endorsement message embedded in an email advertisement on customer behavior – the message embed calls attention to reviews of third-persons’ hotel-stays, mostly positive assessments, and a high overall rating (i.e. four stars in Trip...

This study investigates competing for theoretical stances (i.e., choice overload vs. choice cornucopia) and explores how increases in spending occur in high and low choice conditions following receiving promotional gift offers in a service consumption setting. This study includes a nonobtrusive field experiment (n = 200) that includes measured and...

“Sustainable fashion”, also known as “eco fashion”, is a part of the growing design, manufacturing, and consumption philosophy and trend toward system maintainability. The goal of system maintainability is to create regularity which is supportable indefinitely in terms of human impact on the environment and social responsibility. Sustainable fashio...

This study provides a theory of the influences of alternative national cultures (as complex wholes) on customers’ tipping behaviors following receiving of services in restaurants and taxicabs. Based on complexity theory tenets, the study constructs and tests models asymmetrically—offers separate models for explaining and forecasting high tipping ve...

This paper documents a United States‐based experiment that tested response rates to an online travel survey request. The results of the experiment revealed a dramatically lower rate of response to requests sent by a researcher with an ethnically Chinese‐name than to an identical request from a researcher with a Western‐name. The importance of this...

This paper documents a USA-based experiment that tested response rates to an online travel survey request. The results of the experiment revealed a dramatically lower rate of response to requests sent by a researcher with an ethnically Chinese-name than to an identical request from a researcher with a Western-name. The importance of this study is e...

In today’s organizations, work is increasingly conducted in teams. Meanwhile, a 'think manager think male' mentality persists as leadership and masculinity continue to be viewed as synonymous (Schein, Mueller, Lituchy, & Liu, 1996). However, work in teams can be socially complex and some evidence suggests that in such conditions, feminine, socially...

The pharmaceutical industry spends billions annually on marketing to physicians (over $4.3 billion in 2014). The industry as a whole has a lot of experience in determining what to say to physicians, but it is less confident when it comes to how to say it—sometimes leading to advertising that does not engage, thereby costing sales. In an effort to d...

LaPlaca alone and with colleagues has contributed > 100 insightful studies focusing in advancing science in industrial marketing management (IMM).His body of work constitutes a remarkable scholarly legacy in identifying the milestones in advances in the pursuit of scientific contributions in IMM and in informing scholars of what the field must tack...

This study applies asymmetric rather than conventional symmetric analysis to advance theory in occupational psychology. The study applies systematic case-based analyses to model complex relations among conditions (i.e., configurations of high and low scores for variables) in terms of set memberships of managers. The study uses Boolean algebra to id...

This chapter identifies research advances in theory and analytics that contribute successfully to the primary need to be filled to achieve scientific legitimacy: configurations that include accurate explanation, description, and prediction – prediction here refers to predicting future outcomes and outcomes of cases in samples separate from the samp...

Currently, most of the empirical management, marketing, and psychology articles in the leading journals in these disciplines are examples of bad science practice. Bad science practice includes mismatching case (actor) focused theory and variable-data analysis with null hypothesis significance tests (NHST) of directional predictions (i.e., symmetric...

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...

This chapter elaborates on the usefulness of embracing complexity theory, modeling outcomes rather than directionality, and modeling complex rather than simple outcomes in strategic management. Complexity theory includes the tenet that most antecedent conditions are neither sufficient nor necessary for the occurrence of a specific outcome. Identify...

This special issue includes 27 customer experience (CX) trade tales as told in the words of real shoppers and customers. Some tales are of dilemmas and cognitive dissonance, whilst others share their elation at receiving the value, satisfaction, and respect they felt they deserved. When reading these accounts, you are likely to agree that there is...

This chapter is the introduction to the 26 trade-tale case studies in the present volume. Face-to-face, telephone, and written interactions between salespersons and customers and service-providers and customers occur frequently in everyday life. Successful communications and outcomes are likely to occur for the majority of these encounters. However...

Unique from prior research that deconstructs culture into separate attributes and reports on the symmetric “net effect” of each, the current study identifies holistic configurations of culture that account for the prevalence of tipping behaviors across tourism industries. Consistent with the theory that distinct holistic cultures predict tipping an...

This essay elaborates on the usefulness of embracing complexity theory, modeling outcomes rather than directionality, and modeling complex rather than simple outcomes in strategic management. Complexity theory includes the tenet that most antecedent conditions are neither sufficient nor necessary for the occurrence of a specific outcome. Identifyin...

The focus of this study is on analyzing influencing factors of antisocial travel-related behaviors - in particular road rage. Building on the concept of redirection, the current chapter develops a theory of natural and planned redirection to derive starting points for demarketing antisocial behaviors. A fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (f...

Consumer behavior in tourism (CBT) is an interdisciplinary field of study encompassing the basic behavioral and economic sciences (e.g., psychology, sociology, and economics) and applied fields of study (e.g., management, marketing, tourism, and hospitality) focusing on all aspects of discretionary travel. This chapter describes major issues and fi...

This study applies asymmetric rather than conventional symmetric analysis to advance theory in occupational psychology. The study applies systematic case-based analyses to model complex relations among conditions (i.e., configurations of high and low scores for variables) in terms of set memberships of managers. The study uses Boolean algebra to id...

This study 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” in proposing firms' com...

Prior research on proenvironmental and prosocial behavior focuses primarily on explaining consistent rather than paradoxical tendencies. Even though this field receives wide attention from different scientific disciplines, findings for many causal factors of such proenvironmental orientation are contradictory. Nevertheless, knowing who those indivi...

This study proposes and tests empirically a configural asymmetric theory of the antecedents to hospitality employee happiness-at-work and managers’ assessments of employees’ quality of work-performance. The study confirms and goes beyond prior statistical findings of small-to-medium effect sizes of happiness-performance relationships. The study mer...

This book takes the reader beyond net effects and main and interaction effects thinking and methods. Complexity theory includes the tenet that recipes are more important than ingredients-any one antecedent (X) condition is insufficient for a consistent outcome (Y) (e.g., success or failure) even though the presence of certain antecedents may be nec...

How to avoid bad science practices in data analysis in behavioral science.

This chapter proposes a holistic (i.e., “recipe” or “algorithm”) post-positivistic approach to theory and data analysis to learn the impacts of alternative cultural complex wholes on the proportion of service professions within a nation. The study here includes substantially re-examining and extending the theory and findings by Lynn et al. (1993) t...

Even though several scholars describe the telling weaknesses in such procedures, the dominating logic in research in the management subdisciplines continues to rely on symmetric modeling using continuous variables and null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST). Though the term of reference is new, somewhat precise outcome testing (SPOT) procedures...

This chapter describes and tests the principles of configural theory in the context of hospitality frontline service employees’ happiness-at-work and managers’ assessments of these employees’ quality of work performances. The study proposes and tests empirically a configural asymmetric theory of the antecedents to hospitality employee happiness-at-...

This chapter describes tenets of complexity theory including the precept that within the same set of data X relates to Y positively, negatively, and not at all. A consequence to this first precept is that reporting how X relates positively to Y with and without additional terms in multiple regression models ignores important information available i...

Recognizing Gigerenzer’s (1991) dictum that scientists’ tools are not neutral (tools-in-use influence theory formulation as well as data interpretation), this chapter reports theory and examines data in ways that transcend the dominant logics for variable-based and case-based analyses. The theory and data analysis tests key propositions in complexi...

This chapter describes the complementary benefits of model-building and data analysis using algorithm and statistical modeling methods in the context of unobtrusive marketing field experiments and in transforming findings into isomorphic-management models. Relevant for marketing performance measurement, case-based configural analysis is a relativel...

This chapter points out that the use of a wide range of theoretical paradigms in marketing research requires researchers to use a broad range of methodologies. As an aid in doing so, the chapter argues for the use of case study research (CSR), defines CSR, and describes several CSR theories and methods that are useful for describing, explaining, an...

This commentary offers vignettes on the introductions of the ‘internet of things’ (IoT) and their impacts on revising the service-dominant (S-D) logic paradigm in marketing. Except smart phones, most consumer households are not participating now in the IoT revolution – but most product-service radical innovations include a 20+ year low-growth start...

Do some individuals identify themselves to be prolific liars? Here, “big-liars” are individuals who self-report telling lies twelve-or-more times annually. What share of Americans (or any other national population) is big-liars? What share reports telling no lies? Can individual social-economic status (SES) and social factor configurations identify...

This chapter presents a new model for developing and assessing the decision competencies of executive decision-makers. Prior models consider individual and group decision-making but neglect to consider the impact of group-interactive decision-making on real-world problem-solving and sense-making activities. In the present study experimental protoco...

Though no one definition fully captures the proposal, “flipping-the-classroom” includes student/trainee creation of learning materials, “lesson plans”, and in-classroom administration, and/or coaching to fellow students/trainees of concepts, principles, procedures, tools, and interpretations of outcomes. This JGSMS special issue presents 11 flippin...

A customer goes online at a firm’s (AbsolutelyBest) website and orders a 9-lb ham to be delivered to their daughter’s home in Pocatello, Idaho, on 29 December. The customer pays extra for two-day delivery service. The ham fails to arrive on the 29 December due date. The customer asks for a credit on service not received. Bad weather hit most of the...

This chapter covers the QCA analysis of memberships of outcome conditions, decision confidence and decision competence for each of the individual in-basket simulations. The treatment and measured antecedents are re-explored during the same 2-h experiment and results were recorded for the same participants, in the same physical contexts and all othe...

Conventional correlational analysis and conventional null hypothesis statistical testing (NHST) (e.g., multiple regression analysis including structural equation modeling) assume symmetrical relationships between the independent variables and a dependent variable (Fiss, 2011; Ragin, 2006b, 2008a; Woodside, 2013). The conventional methods represent...

“Incompetency training” includes formal and informal instruction that consciously (purposively) or unconsciously imparts knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behavior (including procedures) that are useless, inaccurate, misleading, and/or will lower performance outcomes of the trainee versus no training or training using alternative training methods....

A major objective of this study is to design developmental interventions or combinations of causal conditions (used interchangeably with “teaching methods”) that include managers’ use of appropriate heuristics and other decision-making tools to ensure decision competency and decision confidence. This study investigates the impact of four different...