Who Approves Fraudulence? Configurational Causes of Consumers’ Unethical Judgments

Abstract

Corrupt behavior presents major challenges for organizations in a wide range of settings. This article embraces a complexity theoretical perspective to elucidate the causal patterns of factors underlying consumers' unethical judgments. This study examines how causal conditions of four distinct domains combine into configurational causes of unethical judgments of two frequent forms of corrupt consumer behavior: shoplifting and fare dodging. The findings of fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analyses indicate alternative, consistently sufficient ''recipes'' for the outcomes of interest. This study extends prior work on the topic by offering new insights into the interplay and the interconnected structures of multiple causal factors and by describing configurational causes of consumers' ethical evaluations of corrupt behaviors. This knowledge may support practitioners and policy makers to develop education and control approaches to thwart corrupt consumer behaviors.

Business and Human Rights: A Configurational View of the Antecedents of Human Rights Infringements by Emerging Market Firms

“…We chose this approach because it generated a conservative model, anchored in theory and empirically plausible, prioritizing the validity and clarity of the configurations. Our choice is consistent with prior work in fsQCA (e.g., Leischnig & Woodside, 2019) and with the key tenets of the fsQCA method (Misangyi et al, 2017;Ragin, 2008;Wagemann & Schneider, 2010).…”

“…This approach enables us to study how multiple causal attributes combine into distinct configurations to produce an interesting outcome (conjunctural causation), and to assess whether multiple configurations are linked to the same outcome (equifinality), in this case, involvement in HRIs. Management researchers have used fsQCA to study, for instance, consumers' unethical judgments (Leischnig & Woodside, 2019), board gender diversity (Lewellyn & Muller-Kahle, 2020), the adoption of ethical standards (Prado & Woodside, 2015), the drivers of high performance (Brenes et al, 2019), institutional diversity (Jackson & Deeg, 2008), varieties of capitalism (Judge et al, 2014), strategies to manage institutional voids (Brenes et al, 2019), stakeholder and shareholder orientation drivers (Crilly, 2011), and the antecedents of opportunism in market entry (Verbeke et al, 2019).…”

The Total Factor Productivity of China’s Software Industry and its Promotion Path

“…Secondly, the relationship between factors and outcome is analyzed from a systematic perspective, and the fsQCA considers that there can be multiple different path configuration combinations to achieve the outcome. In this way, our research outcome is not only more consistent with what logic might imply，but also more instructive for improving the China's software industry [15]. Thirdly, fsQCA focuses on the asymmetric causal relationship between causes and effects, which breaks through the limitations of the symmetric thinking based on correlation coefficient in traditional quantitative research [16]- [17].…”

“…According to the research of Zhang [6], scholars discussed capital factors [18]- [20], technical factors [3], [21], environmental factors [18], [23] and human factors [20], [25] on the software industry TFP and used the interpretive structure model method, the quantile regression method and the Tobit model for testing [15], [19], [23]. However, previous studies mainly focused on the "net effect" of a single factor on TFP, while ignoring the matching effect between multiple factors [10].…”

“…Therefore, the frequency cutoff value is set to 1 in this study. In addition, the main representative literature research of fsQCA recommends that at least 75-80% of all of the empirical cases should be part of the analysis [15], [58].…”