most theories in social sciences have aspects of causality, but understanding the causes of social phenomena is not possible through statistical correlation tests. to overcome this problem, fuzzy qualitative comparative analysis was developed to identify the cause of social phenomena. having qualitative roots, this method tests the necessary and sufficient causes for the emergence of a social p...

Industry life-cycle research on firm survival concentrates on the effects of entry timing, pre-entry experience, and innovativeness. However, findings on how these effects change over different stages of the life cycle are scarce. To fill this gap, we perform a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis on a dataset of 58 video game device producers in six product generations. We find that both...

Purpose – Strategic alignment is a theory-based state that is considered as crucial for organizations in order to realize performance gains from information technology (IT) investments and deployments. Within the domain of purchasing and supply chain management there has been a growing interest on how purchasing strategy can be effectively aligned with IT and what conditions facilitate this sta...

This study investigates the conditions leading to higher levels of innovation using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA). More specifically, using fsQCA, this study explores the impact of inter-organisational knowledge transfer networks and organisations’ internal capabilities on different types of innovation in Small to Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) in the high-tech sector. A su...

We present some similarity and distance measures between intuitionistic fuzzy sets (IFSs). Thus, we propose two semi-metric distance measures between IFSs. The measures are applied to classification of shapes and handwritten Arabic sentences described with intuitionistic fuzzy information. The experimental results permitted to do a comparative analysis between intuitionistic fuzzy similarity an...

While there has been a proliferation of academic interest in ‘democratic innovations’, most empirical analysis tends to rely on single case studies. Very little attention has been given to either comparative analysis of innovations or the conditions under which they emerge and are sustained. Recent studies of participatory budgeting (PB) have begun to utilise cross-case analysis in an attempt t...

Fuzzy sets are relatively new to social science. The first comprehensive introduction of fuzzy sets to the social sciences was offered by Michael Smithson (1987). However, applications were few and far between until the basic principles of fuzzy set analysis were elaborated through Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA; see Ragin 1987; 2000), an analytic system that is fundamentally settheoreti...