How can a single scholarly work be labeled both as “history” and “social science”? In other words, is there a method integrating these two different disciplines into one? Conventional wisdom tends to accept the view that the two disciplines can never be integrated, since epistemological and methodological differences exist, dividing social scientists and historians. However, shown in Hoshiro (2015), I argued that we could theorize history if we followed some rules and methods. This paper aims to summarize such methods and show a concrete example of the “process creating” I have proposed. Although my field of study is political science, I believe that my method could be useful to other fields as well.

The purpose of this study is to discuss the usefulness of fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), a Boolean-based set-theoretical approach. To that end, an empirical analysis of the relationship between retail mix and customer satisfaction was conducted.
As a result, various configurations of the factors of retail mix that affect customer satisfaction were found and causal asymmetry between them were implied. These findings were different from those of conventional statistical analyses using regression model; the analyses results of using fsQCA indicate an existence of causal asymmetry.

This study examines the effect of organizational ambidexterity on business performance. We integrate the empirical findings from 52 studies (70 effect sizes) using meta-analysis techniques. The findings of meta-analysis reveal that organizational ambidexterity has a positive correlation with business performance. We further argue the moderating effects of measurement methods and research context on the relationship between organizational ambidexterity and business performance. Our findings show that using common method for measuring organizational ambidexterity and performance inflates their relationship. Regarding research context, our findings reveal that the effect of organizational ambidexterity is stronger for not high-technology industry than high-technology industry. Also, the results indicate that organizational ambidexterity is significant for business regardless of country.

The formation and the maintenance of cooperation in social groups or organizations have been of interest in various fields of researchers. In this paper, having the recent development of the studies on the evolution of cooperation using computer simulations in mind, we introduce and explain the following mechanisms to facilitate cooperative behaviors in a group: direct reciprocity, indirect reciprocity, multi-level selection and network reciprocity.

Momentum is the power that controls the direction of organizational inertia. This study demonstrates the influence of process management on strategic momentum. By using negative binomial regression, the study analyzes 116 incidents in data from“ the chemical disaster database.”
The results of analyses show that longer experience in process management significantly contributes to preventing recurrences of chemical disaster. Furthermore, interaction analysis reveals that the number of large-scale disasters increases with the decline in the recurrence of small-scale disasters by process management.
Therefore, it is considered that this study makes a theoretical contribution to organizational learning theory as well as provides a practical contribution by demonstrating the influence of process management on reducing chemical disasters.

Despite the increase in online collaborative communities and the number of researches on such communities, there remain certain unexplained questions. Although there are fruitful existing researches with a focus on participants’ motivation and their organizational structure, only a few researchers have tried to shed light on the dynamics of collaboration and coordination in online communities.
To examine how participants evolve online collaborations and how to coordinate among them on a chronic basis, this paper conducted two 10-year case studies of two large-scale online communities that have been aiming to edit an online-encyclopedia article.
As a result, I found the following three facts: Firstly in the early stage of collaboration, participants do not use any explicit coordinating procedure. Participants in the early stage try to coordinate by self-adjusting their own activities. Secondly, when a certain trouble occurs, however, participants gradually deploy an explicit coordinating procedure, which are divided into three basic categories: structured coordinating, stored information coordinating and communicative coordinating. Thirdly, coordinating experiences are implicitly or explicitly shared with participants after problems had been solved, and they use experiences as coordinating procedures. Based on these findings, this paper depicts an overall picture of coordination as a gradually unfolding process composed of an implicit and three explicit coordinating procedures.

This article verifies which environmental factors on innovation activities help firms provide their technologies for external organizations, by using the 2009 Japanese National Innovation Survey. As a result, we found the following aspects: Firstly, firms with the higher effectiveness of legal protection to appropriate returns from their innovation activities offer their technologies to a wider range of external organizations. Secondly, firms with a better understanding of their complementary assets make their technologies available to more external organizations. Lastly, changes in market environments affect the openness of firm’s innovation activities.