ABSTRACT
This book has presented a methodology for examining the process of failure of firms. In doing this it represents a break from the past in that it moves away from models that attempt to discriminate between failed and non-failed firms. For this departure it has employed the methodology to examine a set composed purely of firms which all fail. Nevertheless, it is a property of the methodology that it can accommodate discrimination models within the family of models that it includes. In this context these models can be seen as partial or special case models so that their failings and/or special assumptions are made more explicit and apparent. This is not only shown to be the situation at the methodological level through the construction of a family of models, but the more general models tested within the methodological framework are empirically more successful than the partial, special case models. At the critical level alone this makes a contribution: it clearly indicates that the great mass of results in the literature are potentially all biased and damaged by their partialness/special case limitations.
