Section Fiveclassifications. Thus, the empirical description of strategies
poses a limitation on the amount of performance that
contingency models are capable of explaining. In addition, it is
often difficult to obtain sufficient numbers of companies in
highly specialized industrial categories to make valid
intraindustry comparisons. On the other hand, broader
industrial classifications, such as manufacturing, that provide
more companies in each category, often produce groupings of
companies that have very little in common.
Furthermore, while strategic frameworks such as Porter’s
and others presented earlier are useful conceptual and planning
tools they are probably not sufficiently complex to capture
complete business strategies. Consequently, their incomplete
representation of strategies reduces the explanatory power of
statistical tests used to test the superiority of contingency and
fit versus universal best practices. These examples of
methodological difficulties point out that it is probably unrea-
sonable to draw conclusions that we should expect equivalent
performance for universally applied best practices and internally
and externally compatible systems of human resource
practices. The methodological difficulties are sufficiently
challenging that failures to find differences should not cause us
to conclude that the approaches have the same effect. Such
failures to find differences may simply indicate that we are not
measuring the contingency or fit approach with sufficient accu-