Beyond Gaussian averages: redirecting international business and management research toward extreme events and power laws

Practicing managers live in a world of ‘extremes’, but international business and management research is based on Gaussian statistics that rule out such extremes. On occasion, positive feedback processes among interactive data points cause extreme events characterized by power laws. They seem ubiquitous; we list 80 kinds of them – half each among natural and social phenomena. We use imposed tension and Per Bak's ‘self-organized criticality’ to...