“Application of Fuzzy‑Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) and Necessary Configuration Analysis (NConfA) in Business Research”

Call for Papers – Special Issue: “Application of Fuzzy‑Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) and Necessary Configuration Analysis (NConfA) in Business Research”

Journal: Strategic Business Research
Publisher: Elsevier
Submission deadline: 30 June 2026

This special issue aims to advance the use of asymmetric, set‑theoretic, and configuration‑based methods—particularly fsQCA, NCA, and NConfA—in business and strategic‑management research. It invites work that demonstrates how these approaches can reveal multiple causal pathways, necessary conditions, and indispensable configurations underlying complex organisational and market outcomes.

Why this issue matters

• Modern business environments are highly complex and asymmetric: outcomes often result from combinations of conditions rather than single linear drivers, making traditional symmetric methods (e.g., multiple regression) insufficient.

• fsQCA, NCA, and NConfA offer powerful tools to model sufficient and necessary causation, helping to uncover alternative configurations that lead to similar outcomes (e.g., innovation, customer loyalty, sustainability, digital‑readiness).

• This SI consolidates recent methodological progress and encourages scholars to theorise more explicitly in terms of “configurations” and “thresholds”, aligning research design with the real‑world complexity of strategic decision‑making.

Key themes and research topics

Contributions are welcome from strategic management, marketing, OB, HR, entrepreneurship, innovation, operations, supply chain, finance, and information systems, as well as service‑intensive domains (e.g., tourism, hospitality, retail, public‑sector, NGOs). Possible topics include:

• Sufficient configurational and asymmetric explanations

  • Strategic adaptation patterns under digital transformation, sustainability pressures, or market volatility.

  • Configurations of organisational capabilities that drive innovation, growth, or resilience.

  • Multi‑condition explanations of customer‑behaviour, engagement, or loyalty.

• Necessary conditions and threshold‑based insights

  • Minimum resource or capability thresholds required for successful digitalisation, transformation, or service innovation.

  • Essential conditions for effective governance, ESG outcomes, or operational continuity.

  • Necessary‑configuration insights using NConfA to identify indispensable combinations of antecedents.

• Integrative and multi‑method designs

  • Hybrids of fsQCA/NCA/NConfA with PLS‑SEM, CB‑SEM, ANN, qualitative case studies, experiments, or longitudinal designs.

  • Integrated or narrative literature reviews that systematise configurational and asymmetry‑based findings in business research.

Expected contributions

Manuscripts should:

• Clearly justify the choice of asymmetric or necessity‑based methods over symmetric approaches.

• Provide transparent calibration procedures, robustness checks, and consistency/coverage analyses.

• Develop theoretical insights that explicitly reflect sufficiency and/or necessity logic.

• Offer actionable implications for strategic management, organisational practice, and policy.

Empirical, methodological, conceptual, and multidisciplinary papers are all encouraged.

Guest editors

• Dr. S. Mostafa Rasoolimanesh, Edith Cowan University, Australia

• Dr. Behzad Foroughi, I‑Shou University, Taiwan

• Prof. Carla Curado, University of Lisbon, Portugal

Submission details

• Submission platform: Strategic Business Research’s Editorial Manager:
  https://www.editorialmanager.com/sbr

• When submitting, select article type “VSI: Research Methods”.

• Manuscripts can be submitted at any time before the 30 June 2026 deadline.

• Submissions will undergo double‑blind peer review by at least two independent reviewers and, if accepted, will be published in the latest regular issue and grouped under the special‑issue webpage.

This SI is ideal for methodologically oriented business‑researchers who wish to push the frontier of configurational and asymmetry‑based analysis in strategy, management, and applied domains.

ServiceSetu Academics — Premier Platform for Academic Opportunities & Research Collaboration

Visit official website of the publisher