In this workshop, you will learn about the core concepts of Necessary Condition Analysis (NCA) and the latest developments of this increasingly popular research method. NCA has been adopted in many fields, including International Management, Human Resource Management, Strategy, Organizational Behavior, Operations and Supply Chain Management, and Entrepreneurship.

NCA understands cause-effect relations as “necessary but not sufficient” and not as additive and average logic that is used in regression analysis. “Necessary” means that an outcome will not occur without the right level of the condition, independently of the rest of the causal structure (a necessary condition is a “bottleneck”, “critical factor”, or “constraint”). In practice, the right level must be put and kept in place to avoid failure, and to allow the outcome to exist.

NCA can be used as a stand-alone tool or in combination with regression analysis, qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) and other methodological approaches. By adding a different logic and data analysis approach, NCA adds both rigor and relevance to theory and data analysis.

This interactive session familiarizes scholars with the method and has two parts. Part 1 is a general introduction discussing the core concepts of NCA and the importance of necessary conditions, illustrated with examples from different fields. Part 2 helps participants to become the first users of NCA in their field, with a practical demonstration about the application of NCA on how to build necessity theories, and how to analyze data for testing such theories using the NCA software and how to report the research in journal publications.

The workshop is organized by Dr. Stefan Breet (Radboud University Nijmegen), Professor Jan Dul (Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University), and Professor Ricarda Bouncken (University of Bayreuth).