Abstract: We study how competitive response to rivals’ actions diffuses in an industry. We argue that as firms engage in competition across multiple markets and business domains, they allocate more attention to some threats than others. Drawing on the literature on behavioural strategy and Chen & Miller’s AMC model of competitive dynamics, we develop a diffusion model of the spread of a competitive action throughout an industry. Using this model we run simulations to study when different types of firms choose to respond to a competitive threat. We find that depending on initial conditions, diffusion of competitive actions can have (a) stagnation (b) momentary spread and (c) bandwagon effects in an industry.

Abstract: We examine whether competing for a non-monetary prize affects behavior. We focus on the behavior of top US players during the regular PGA Tour season as they compete to earn a place to play for their country in the Ryder Cup in top US golfers as they compete to play for their country in the Ryder Cup. We find evidence that the glory associated with being part of the USA Ryder Cup Team is a motivation for elite players. We also find that when players get close to the final qualification date they start to “choke” under pressure. Choking under pressure is intensified when players are trying to qualify for a Ryder Cup that will be held in the US.

Abstract: We explore the temporal properties of rhetorical strategies in interorganizational sensegiving in nascent industry contexts. In efforts to persuade others, sensegiving actors rhetorically (re)configure coherent, plausible, and acceptable relationships between the past, present and future of their shared environment. However, as yet we do not understand why actors might go further back into the past, or further forward into the future, when representing environmental change, and how these temporal distances could impact their resulting interpretations. To address this, we analyze extensive qualitative data from a longitudinal investigation into individual sensemaking/sensegiving in the nascent electric vehicle industry in a Northern European country. Our analysis exposes four distinct rhetorical strategies that are enabled by different combinations of past/future temporal distance in environmental change representations.