Business and Management Concepts Explained: A Reference Guide to the Models, Frameworks and Cases

A reference for the models, frameworks and decided cases that business and management study runs on. Each entry opens with who originated it, what question it answers and where it is used, then explains it at the length the idea actually needs.

How this guide to business and management concepts is organised

This is a reference guide to business and management concepts: the models, the frameworks, the matrices and the decided cases that courses in the subject examine. Six sections, each holding the concepts a particular field examines. The plot above places them on two axes — how formal the methods are, and how far ahead the decisions look — because the sections are not a list of equals. Research methods and accounting sit at the formal end and are judged against a procedure. Organisational behaviour and marketing sit at the behavioural end and are judged against evidence about people, which is a different kind of argument.

The vertical axis separates the operational from the strategic. A settlement period is a question about this quarter. A parenting-fit assessment is a question about which businesses a group should own at all. Entries near the bottom of the plot are about running something; entries near the top are about deciding what to run.

Neither axis is a ranking. The purpose of the placement is to make the relationships visible: two concepts close together are usually taught together and frequently confused with each other, and knowing that in advance is most of the work.

What one entry contains, explained

Every page opens with the same four facts, so a reader can decide within seconds whether it is the right page: who originated the idea, what field it belongs to, the question it answers, and where it is used.

Below that, the idea is explained at the length it needs, not at a length chosen in advance. A case entry sets out the facts, the decision, the reasoning, the criticism it attracted and what survives of it today. A framework entry sets out the components, how they are applied in order, where the framework was built and what it cannot see. Every entry ends with how the topic is actually examined and which two or three errors cost the most marks, because those are consistent and they are rarely written down.

What the sections cover

UK commercial law holds the implied terms in a contract of sale and the cases that decide them. Title, description, satisfactory quality, fitness for purpose and sale by sample have sat in the same numbered sections since 1893, which is why a Victorian decision still cites a section a reader recognises. The section also covers what changed for consumers in 2015, which is where most dating errors happen.

Accounting and finance holds three bodies of work that answer different questions about the same money: what the accounts should say happened, which investments to make and how to fund them, and what changes when the money is in more than one currency. It includes the failure cases — Enron, Polly Peck — read as mechanisms and not as morality, because each one is a specific treatment that was permitted, misled, and was closed afterwards.

Strategy holds the frameworks, arranged so that it is clear which question each answers and which decade produced it. Where to compete, what cannot be copied, and who has to agree are three different questions, and most weak strategic analysis is a tool applied to the question it was not built for.

Marketing holds the mix, brand equity and buying behaviour. The recurring correction in this field is that almost every framework is written from the seller's side, and the strongest use of each is the one that notices. Most arguments about what a brand is worth turn out to be arguments about which component is meant, which is what Aaker's brand equity model exists to separate.

Organisational behaviour and HR holds leadership style, power and culture — how direction is given, where influence actually sits, and what shapes behaviour before anybody decides anything.

Research methods holds the sequence of choices that decides whether a dissertation is worth anything: what counts as knowledge, whether you are testing a theory or building one, what you will actually do, and who you will ask.

How to use it

If you know what you are looking for, the full index lists every entry in one place, and the search habits that help when you only have half a name are set out there — cases are filed by the parties, statutory topics by the term and not the section number, models by the author.

If you do not, start at a section page. Each one explains how its entries relate to one another and names the two or three to read first, which is more useful than an alphabetical list when the shape of a field is what you are missing.

Used as a management models and frameworks reference, the site is meant to be entered at the point you need rather than read through, and the three routes below are what a guide of this kind owes its reader.

If you are preparing an answer, read the examination section of the entry before the rest of it. It says what the question is actually testing, which usually reveals that the material you were about to revise is not the material the marks are in.

How this reference handles its sources

Where an entry sets out a model that belongs to a named author, it explains the idea in its own words and names the source, so a reader who needs the original can go straight to it. Cases are cited to their law report and statutes to their section, with enough of the facts to be checked against either.

An entry states what a decision held and why, at the length that takes. Serious work still goes to the report itself, and the citation is there to make that a short walk rather than a search. That is the whole ambition of a management models and frameworks reference: to get a reader to the primary material faster than an index would, with enough of the substance already in hand to know whether it is worth the trip.

The standard the entries are held to

Three rules apply to everything published here, and they are the reason business and management concepts explained on this site read the way they do.

Business and management concepts explained at this length need a standard to hold them together, and these three are it.

A concept gets one page. Splitting an idea across several short pages makes it easier to publish and harder to read. Where two ideas are genuinely a matched pair — Priest v Last and Griffiths v Peter Conway, the two implied terms in section 14 — each has its own entry and each explains the other, because that is how they are examined.

The limits are stated where the idea is explained, not left to a reader to discover. A framework that cannot see something is more useful once you know what, and a model derived from a sample that does not resemble your case is worth knowing about before you apply it.

Nothing is asserted that cannot be attributed. Where a figure, a date or a holding appears, it is one that can be checked. Where a question is genuinely contested — whether positioning or resources better explains performance, whether a rules-based framework would serve better than a principles-based one — the entry gives both cases and says which way the weight falls, rather than presenting one side as settled.

The confusions that cost the most marks

Some pairs are mistaken for each other often enough that the entries are written around the distinction instead of mentioning it at the end.

Satisfactory quality and fitness for a particular purpose are the clearest. Both sit in section 14, both require a business seller, and they ask different questions: whether the goods are good enough for what such goods are normally for, and whether they are good enough for what this buyer said they wanted. A problem mentioning an unusual use is signalling the second while looking like the first.

Capacity and authority in company law. Whether the company could do the act at all, and whether the person who acted could bind it. The first question has been answered by statute since the objects clause stopped limiting outsiders; the second is agency and is very much alive. An answer that declares a contract void for being beyond the objects is applying a rule that was abolished.

Realised and unrealised in reporting. A revaluation increases equity and reported net assets and adds nothing a company may lawfully distribute — the point where the property, plant and equipment rules and the distributable profits rules meet. The asymmetry is not conservatism for its own sake: paying cash out on the strength of an estimate turns a paper gain into an irreversible transfer, and the creditors carry the error.

Reliability and validity in research methods. Consistency and correctness are not the same property, and the relationship runs one way: an instrument can be perfectly consistent about the wrong thing, and it cannot be correct without being consistent.

Positioning and resources in strategy. Whether profit comes from the industry a firm is in or from something inside the firm. They are usually taught as rivals and are better read as complements — a resource is valuable only in relation to some market, and a market position is defensible only when something makes it hard to copy.

Two kinds of entry, read differently

A case entry is read for the rule and the reason. The facts matter only so far as they show which rule was engaged; the holding matters; the reasoning matters most, because that is what transfers to a set of facts nobody has seen. Every case entry here also says what happened to the decision afterwards, since a substantial number of the most-taught cases are taught precisely because their result was thought wrong enough to change the law.

A framework entry is read for the components and the conditions. A framework is a set of questions arranged in an order, and using one means answering its questions about a specific situation, not describing the framework. Every framework entry here ends on what the tool cannot see, because naming that is what separates an analysis from a recital.

On dates

A great many errors in this field are dating errors and not errors of understanding: the right rule applied to the wrong period, or a decision quoted as current law after the statute that produced it was replaced.

Entries state when a rule took effect and what it replaced, and case entries say whether the decision still represents the position. Where a rule changed in stages — and the quality obligations in a sale changed in 1893, 1973, 1979, 1994 and 2015 — the entry gives the sequence, because the sequence is what a question about an older set of facts is testing.

Where an idea sits in more than one field

Several entries could reasonably be filed in two sections, and the choice is made by which examiners ask about them rather than by which discipline owns the idea.

Distributable profits is company law read by accountants. The rule comes from companies legislation and the question — what a business may lawfully pay out — arrives in a financial reporting paper, so it sits under accounting and finance and the commercial law section points at it.

The regulatory framework of accounting is the same shape from the other side: it is about who makes rules and how they bind, which is a legal question, and it is examined in reporting modules.

Consumer research is a marketing question answered with research methods. The process, the sampling and the instrument design are the methods material; the reason anybody runs it is a marketing decision. It sits under research methods because the errors that ruin such a project are methodological ones.

Stakeholder analysis appears in strategy and in organisational behaviour, and the difference is what you do with the map: strategy uses it to decide what the organisation can attempt, organisational behaviour uses it to explain why a change programme stalled.

Where an entry is filed in one place and used in another, the section page that does not hold it says so, so the route in works from either side.

What is deliberately not simplified

Three things in this material are genuinely difficult, and entries that made them simple would be making them wrong.

A test that depends on circumstances gives no fixed answer. Satisfactory quality is judged against price, description and all the other relevant circumstances, which means the same defect breaches the term in one sale and not in another. A reader wanting a rule that decides cases without judgement is asking the statute for something it declined to supply.

A number that comes out of a model is only as good as its worst estimate. A net present value carries four decimal places and rests on a sales forecast six years out. The arithmetic is the easy half; the appraisal entries put the sensitivity before the recommendation for that reason.

A framework built for one set of conditions does not travel unchanged. Industry structure analysis assumes boundaries stable enough to analyse. Leadership research produced in one part of the world is applied everywhere. Entries say where a tool came from, because that is usually the fastest way to see where it stops working.

The six sections

UK Commercial Law

Sale of goods, contract formation and the decided cases that fix what the statutory terms mean in practice.

Accounting & Finance

Reporting treatments, appraisal methods and the market models used to price capital and currency.

Strategy

Positioning, growth and governance frameworks, and the matrices that make their trade-offs explicit.

Marketing

Segmentation, brand measurement and buying-behaviour models, with the cases they are taught through.

Organisational Behaviour & HR

Leadership continua, motivation theory and the employment structures organisations work within.

Research Methods

Research philosophy, design choices and the layered models used to justify a method.