Explore science by method, field &amp; evidence.

Affective Events Theory

Affective Events Theory (AET) is the macro framework that reoriented organizational research toward emotions and the events that cause them. Proposed by Howard Weiss and Russell Cropanzano in 1996, it argues that features of the work environment give rise to discrete events — daily hassles and uplifts — that trigger af

2 sources1996

BCG Growth-Share Matrix

The BCG growth-share matrix is a portfolio-analysis tool that classifies a diversified company's business units on two axes — the growth rate of their market and their market share relative to the largest competitor — and uses that classification to guide cash allocation across the portfolio. Devised by Bruce Henderson

2 sources1977

environmental economics

Benefit Transfer Valuation

Benefit transfer is the practice of using economic value estimates from existing valuation studies to estimate the value of an environmental change at a new policy site where conducting a fresh primary study is not feasible. As systematized in Johnston, Rolfe, Rosenberger and Brouwer's 2015 guide, it ranges from simple

1 source2015

Blue Ocean Strategy Canvas Analysis

Blue ocean strategy canvas analysis is a framework for escaping crowded, competitive 'red ocean' markets by creating uncontested 'blue ocean' market space through value innovation. Developed by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne in their 2004 Harvard Business Review article and 2005 book, it centers on the strategy canvas

2 sources2005

Business Model Canvas Analysis

Business Model Canvas analysis describes and evaluates how a firm creates, delivers, and captures value using nine interlocking building blocks arranged on a single visual canvas. Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur popularized the tool in their 2010 book Business Model Generation, building on the business-model ont

2 sources2010

economic history

Cliometric Counterfactual Analysis

Cliometric counterfactual analysis is the signature technique of the 'new economic history' pioneered by Robert Fogel: it tests claims about the historical importance of an innovation, institution, or event by constructing an explicit, quantified hypothetical economy in which that factor is absent and measuring how muc

2 sources1964

Competitive Dynamics (Action-Response) Analysis

Competitive dynamics analysis studies the actual sequence of competitive moves and countermoves between specific rival firms — who attacks, who responds, how fast, and with what consequence — rather than treating competition as a static structural condition. Ming-Jer Chen's 1996 Academy of Management Review article int

2 sources1996

Critical Incident Technique

The critical incident technique (CIT) is a qualitative procedure for studying human behavior by collecting and classifying detailed accounts of specific incidents in which behavior was especially effective or ineffective in achieving an aim. John Flanagan introduced it in his landmark 1954 Psychological Bulletin articl

1 source1954

environmental economics

Deliberative Monetary Valuation

Deliberative monetary valuation is a hybrid method that combines the deliberative processes of political theory with the monetary metric of environmental economics, eliciting willingness to pay for environmental change through structured group discussion rather than isolated individual survey responses. In Clive Spash'

1 source2007

Destination Choice Experiment

A destination choice experiment is a stated-preference technique that asks travellers to choose among experimentally designed hypothetical destinations, each described by a bundle of attributes such as price, travel distance, climate, the type and quality of attractions, and crowding. Grounded in random-utility theory

2 sources2000

marketing research

Discrete Choice Experiment

A discrete choice experiment (DCE) is a stated-preference method in which respondents repeatedly choose their preferred option from sets of alternatives described by systematically varied attributes, allowing the analyst to estimate how each attribute drives choice. Grounded in McFadden's random utility theory and oper

3 sources1983

Disruptive Innovation Analysis

Disruptive innovation analysis is a framework for classifying innovations and anticipating when a new entrant will overturn established market leaders. Clayton Christensen introduced the theory in his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, which explained the paradox that well-managed incumbent firms can fail precisely bec

2 sources1997

Diversification-Performance Analysis (Rumelt Categories)

Diversification-performance analysis asks whether the kind of diversification a firm pursues — staying focused, expanding into related businesses, or building an unrelated conglomerate — is systematically associated with how well the firm performs. The categorical version originates with Rumelt's 1974 Strategy, Structu

2 sources1974

tourism studies

Doxey Irridex Analysis

Doxey's Irritation Index, or Irridex, is a framework for understanding how a host community's attitude toward tourism changes as the destination grows. Proposed by George Doxey in 1975 as a causation theory of visitor-resident irritants, it holds that residents pass through four sequential states as tourist numbers and

2 sources1975

Expectancy-Disconfirmation Tourist Satisfaction

The expectancy-disconfirmation paradigm is the dominant theory of consumer satisfaction and, applied to tourism, the foundation for understanding why tourists are satisfied or disappointed. Set out in Richard Oliver's 1980 cognitive model, the paradigm holds that satisfaction is not determined by how good an experience

2 sources1980

Experience Curve Analysis

Experience curve analysis describes and projects how the real unit cost of a product falls by a roughly constant percentage every time cumulative production volume doubles, and draws the strategic consequences for cost position and pricing. The Boston Consulting Group, under Bruce Henderson, generalized the older manuf

GE-McKinsey Nine-Box Matrix

The GE-McKinsey nine-box matrix is a multifactor portfolio-analysis tool that positions a company's business units in a three-by-three grid defined by two composite dimensions: the attractiveness of the industry the unit competes in, and the unit's competitive strength within it. Developed by General Electric with McKi

2 sources1983

HOLSAT Holiday Satisfaction Analysis

HOLSAT, short for holiday satisfaction, is an instrument for measuring tourists' satisfaction with a holiday by comparing what they expected before the trip with how the destination actually performed. Developed by John Tribe and Tim Snaith in 1998 and tested in Varadero, Cuba, HOLSAT was a deliberate move beyond the s

2 sources1998

Hospitality Critical Incident Technique

The hospitality critical incident technique studies service quality by collecting and analyzing concrete accounts of especially memorable service encounters, the moments guests recall as outstandingly good or bad. The technique itself was formalized by John Flanagan in 1954 as a set of procedures for gathering direct o

2 sources1954

Hospitality eWOM Analysis

Hospitality eWOM analysis is the systematic study of electronic word-of-mouth, the consumer-generated reviews, ratings, posts and comments that travellers share online about hotels, restaurants, attractions and destinations. Litvin, Goldsmith and Pan (2008) set out the foundational framework, defining eWOM, classifying

2 sources2008

Limits of Acceptable Change

The Limits of Acceptable Change (LAC) framework is a planning system for managing recreation and wilderness areas that shifts the central question from 'how much use is too much?' to 'how much change in conditions is acceptable, and where?' Developed by George Stankey and colleagues for the USDA Forest Service in 1985,

2 sources1985

marketing

Means-End Chain Laddering

Means-end chain analysis explains consumer choice by linking the concrete attributes of a product to the consequences of using it and ultimately to the personal values those consequences serve. Jonathan Gutman's 1982 model proposed that consumers categorize products by the desirable consequences they deliver, and that

2 sources1982

Merger and Acquisition Performance Event Study

A merger and acquisition event study measures the stock-market reaction to a deal announcement to infer how much value the deal is expected to create or destroy for acquirers and targets. The logic is that in an efficient market the share-price jump around the announcement capitalizes investors' revised expectations of

2 sources2001

Mystery Shopping Audit

A mystery shopping audit measures how service is actually delivered by sending trained assessors who pose as ordinary customers to experience and objectively record a service encounter against predefined standards. Alan Wilson's 1998 work set out how this covert method differs from satisfaction surveys: rather than cap

2 sources1998

marketing science

Online Controlled Experiment

Online controlled experiments, commonly called A/B tests, randomly split live web or app traffic between a control and one or more treatment variants to measure the causal effect of a change on user behavior. Ron Kohavi, Diane Tang, and Ya Xu — who built and ran experimentation platforms at Microsoft, Google, and Linke

2 sources2020

Porter's Five Forces Industry Analysis

Porter's five forces framework explains the underlying profitability of an industry through five competitive forces that together determine how much of the value an industry creates is captured by its firms rather than competed or bargained away. Introduced in Michael Porter's 1979 Harvard Business Review article and d

Process Research in Organizations

Process research in organizations studies how and why things emerge, develop, grow, and terminate over time, treating change as a flow of events rather than a relationship between static variables. Ann Langley's 1999 Academy of Management Review article gave the field a toolkit, laying out seven generic strategies for

3 sources1999

marketing

Projective Techniques in Consumer Research

Projective techniques are indirect qualitative methods that elicit consumers' private, often non-conscious thoughts and feelings by having them respond to ambiguous or third-person stimuli rather than answering direct questions. The underlying projective hypothesis, borrowed from clinical psychology, is that when a tas

1 source2003

Push-Pull Motivation Analysis

Push-pull motivation analysis is the dominant framework for explaining why people travel and why they choose particular destinations, by separating two distinct forces. Push factors are internal, socio-psychological motives that create the desire to travel in the first place, such as the wish to escape routine, relax,

Recreation Opportunity Spectrum

The Recreation Opportunity Spectrum (ROS) is a framework for planning and managing outdoor recreation by classifying the landscape into a graded range of settings, from primitive to modern and urbanized. Articulated by Roger Clark and George Stankey for the USDA Forest Service in 1979, ROS rests on the premise that the

Resource-Based View (VRIO) Operationalization

The resource-based view (RBV) explains why firms in the same industry persistently differ in performance: competitive advantage flows from internal resources and capabilities that are valuable, rare, costly to imitate, and exploited by an organization built to use them. Jay Barney's 1991 article gave the theory its rig

2 sources1991

Sensemaking Analysis

Sensemaking analysis studies how people in organizations turn confusing, ambiguous circumstances into accounts they can understand and act on. Karl Weick's 1995 book Sensemaking in Organizations defined the construct and its properties — sensemaking is grounded in identity, retrospective, enactive of the environments p

3 sources1995

Strategic Group Analysis

Strategic group analysis partitions the firms in an industry into clusters that pursue similar strategies along key competitive dimensions, and explains why these clusters persist and why their members earn different returns. The concept originates with Michael Hunt's 1972 dissertation on the U.S. home-appliance indust

2 sources1977

Strategic Group Mapping

Strategic group mapping is the visualization technique that turns strategic group analysis into a readable picture: a two-dimensional plot whose axes are two strategic variables on which firms in an industry differ, with each firm shown as a bubble sized by its market presence. Michael Porter popularized the strategic

2 sources1980

Strategic Scenario Planning

Strategic scenario planning is a structured foresight method that helps organizations make decisions under deep uncertainty by constructing a small set of internally consistent, sharply divergent stories about how the future could unfold. The dominant 'intuitive-logics' tradition was pioneered at Royal Dutch/Shell by P

3 sources1995

Strategic Technology Roadmapping

Strategic technology roadmapping is a planning and visualization method that links what an organization should develop, when, and why by aligning three time-based layers - market drivers, products, and technologies - on a single chart. Robert Phaal, Clare Farrukh, and David Probert of the University of Cambridge synthe

1 source2004

Strategic Value Chain Analysis

Strategic value chain analysis disaggregates a firm into the discrete activities through which it designs, produces, markets, delivers, and supports its product, in order to locate the sources of cost advantage and differentiation that underlie competitive advantage. The framework is Michael Porter's, introduced in his

2 sources1985

Structure-Conduct-Performance Analysis

The structure-conduct-performance (SCP) paradigm is the foundational framework of industrial organization, holding that the structure of an industry shapes the conduct of the firms within it, which in turn determines their performance. In the Bain-Mason tradition, codified in Joe Bain's classic text, industries with hi

2 sources1968

tourism studies

Tourism Area Life Cycle

The Tourism Area Life Cycle (TALC), introduced by Richard Butler in 1980, models a destination as evolving through a recognisable sequence of stages, much as a product moves through its life cycle. Plotted as visitor numbers against time, a typical destination traces an S-shaped curve running from exploration, through

2 sources1980

tourism studies

Tourism Carrying Capacity Assessment

Tourism carrying capacity assessment estimates the maximum level of visitor use a destination or site can sustain before its environment, infrastructure, host community, or visitor experience begins to deteriorate unacceptably. The concept, given its influential tourism formulation by A. M. O'Reilly in 1986, recognises

2 sources1986

Transaction Cost Economics Analysis

Transaction cost economics (TCE) analysis explains how firms should organize their economic exchanges -- whether to buy on the market, make in-house, or use a hybrid arrangement -- by minimizing the sum of production and transaction costs. Building on Coase's question of why firms exist, Oliver Williamson's 1979 articl

Travel Career Pattern

The Travel Career Pattern (TCP) is Philip Pearce's framework for understanding tourist motivation as something that evolves over a traveler's lifetime rather than staying fixed. Originally formulated as the Travel Career Ladder, drawing an analogy to a needs hierarchy, the approach was reworked by Pearce and Lee in 200

2 sources2005

Travel Community Netnography

Travel community netnography applies netnography, ethnography adapted to the study of online communities, to the forums, social-media groups, blogs and review communities where travellers gather to share experiences, advice and meaning. Developed by Robert Kozinets (2002, 2010), netnography offers a rigorous, ethically

2 sources2002

Visitor Experience and Resource Protection

Visitor Experience and Resource Protection (VERP) is the U.S. National Park Service's framework for addressing carrying capacity by managing the conditions of both park resources and visitor experiences rather than counting visitors. Set out in the 1997 NPS handbook, VERP reflects the same insight that drove the Limits

2 sources1997

Visitor-Employed Photography

Visitor-employed photography (VEP) is a participant-generated visual method in which visitors themselves take photographs of what is meaningful, appealing or notable to them in a setting, and the resulting images, together with the visitors' own explanations, become the research data. Introduced by Cherem and Driver (1

2 sources1983