Case studies in Finance

Operations Production Management and International Journal of Production Research as the most common outlets. The review shows that the International Journal of Operations Produc- tion Management is the one most important channel by which case study research is published. Not only are studies in Operations published in this journal, but also articles on the interface of Operations with Strategy and HRM. Almost 10 per cent 62 of all ISI listed publications on case study research in 2000–2005 689 have been published in this journal.

2.1.7 Types of case study research

We were not only interested in the number of publications on case study research but also in what types of case study research were reported in these publications. In particular we were interested in how the published studies are divided over the categories theory-testing, theory-building, and practice-oriented research. In order to classify these publications, we relied on the authors’ statements in the abstracts of the publications. We did not analyse all publications in their entirety. Most case studies that are meant as a contribution to theory either building or testing theory state this explicitly in their title andor abstract. Therefore, we categorized studies with explicitly stated theory-oriented aims either theory-testing or theory-building first. Most of the remaining case studies describe the design, implementation, andor evaluation of some intervention, or illustrate the usefulness of a theory or approach to a specific company or situation. Although such studies might make use of theories or theoretical notions, their aim is not to contribute to the development of those theories. We use the label “practice-oriented” for this category of case studies. The results of our categorization are presented in Table 2.2. The large majority of published case studies are practice-oriented, namely Table 2.2 Three types of case studies in five fields of business research 2000–2005 Strategy Finance Marketing HRM Operations Total Practice-oriented 153 24 19 104 154 454 Theory-building 48 21 19 41 83 212 Theory-testing 5 2 1 8 7 23 Total 206 47 39 153 244 689