Organizational decision-making and strategic product creation in the context of business sustainability outcomes: theoretical synthesis and empirical findings

Abstract

This thesis seeks to answer the question “how do organizational decisions around new product development affect sustainable business outcomes?”. In approaching this, the thesis presents a theoretical synthesis of decision-making theory, strategic product creation theory and business sustainability outcomes. From this synthesis, a series of sub-questions that disaggregate the overarching research question are presented. The qualitative research design, which employs a novel analytical strategy is detailed. Based on this design, the thesis reports extensive and embedded fieldwork undertaken in a single “live” case study, from which detailed analytical results are presented. These results are then interpreted against the theoretical synthesis and against broader theory. The thesis contributes to reinforcing the importance and role of organizational learning in organizational decision-making, based on novel analysis of empirically developed qualitative data. This further reinforces the argument that human behaviours, social relations or markets and environments shape organizations, but that organizations are very much the sum of these factors. This reflects the need to accommodate behavioural realism in theory building. The thesis also presents a methodological contribution in employing automated text analysis.