References BUKU | SAIDNA ZULFIQAR BIN TAHIR (VIKAR)

A review of case studies in business research Raf Jans and Koen Dittrich The aim of this chapter is to provide a background to this book’s approach to case study research. We want ■ to find out how common the case study is in business research and in which scientific journals case studies are published and to describe the types of case studies that were published in a variety of business research areas in the period 2000–2005; and ■ to review how the aims, strengths, weaknesses, and require- ments of case study research have been discussed in those scientific journals. In this chapter we review studies that are presented as case studies by their authors and the journals in which they were published. We have accepted the definition of “case study” as used in these publications which differ considerably, and have not used our own definition of the case study. This implies that publications of research that could be considered case study research but presents itself as something else such as “ethnography” are not included, and that an unknown num- ber of publications of research that is not case study research according to our definition is included. We have limited our analysis of case study methodology in business research to five main fields; 1 Strategy, 2 Finance and Accounting Finance, 3 Marketing, 4 Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Management HRM, and 5 Opera- tions and Supply Chain Management Operations. In our selection and classification of business fields, we did not aim to be exhaustive. Rather, these areas were chosen to provide a general picture of some main research streams within business research. We found that case study research is mostly used for illustration and exploration. A minority of published case studies in business research is theory-oriented, and theory-testing case studies are very rare. Review articles on case study research show that many case studies suffer from a lack of scientific rigour.

2.1 Published case studies in business research

2.1.1 Search strategy and sample

First we identified all publications in scholarly journals in Strategy, Finance, Marketing, HRM and Operations in the Proquest bibliograph- ical database for the period 2000–2005. We used the following search strings: ■ Strateg; ■ Financ, Accounting or Accountancy; ■ Marketing; ■ Human resourc or Organizational Behavior; ■ Operations Management, Supply Chain or Logistics. In the search strings above, the asterix represents wildcard charac- ters. Our search was done on subject terms, which are representative for a specific field in business research. As such, we did not only look for the subjects within the list of specialized journals e.g. only looking for marketing topics in marketing journals, but we considered papers related to a specific subject in all business journals. Note that the cho- sen subjects do not cover the whole field of business and management. Second, within this first set, we identified papers reporting case study research by selecting those publications that had the term “case study”, “case studies”, or “case research” in the title or abstract. Next, within this set of publications, we only considered papers published in jour- nals that are part of the bibliographical databases of the Institute for Scientific Information ISI, assuming that this subset would contain pub- lications of relatively high quality. We were unable to select publica- tions on case study research directly from the ISI databases, since the search term “case study” resulted in all publications with only the word “case” not combined with “study”, which mostly were not case stud- ies. We omitted those publications from the list that were not actually publications dealing with an empirical case study, although they men- tioned such terms in the title or the abstract. For example, we identi- fied 18 publications on case studies in Harvard Business Review, but ten of these appeared to be fictional. We analysed the abstracts of all pub- lications on this final list of case study publications. Table 2.1 documents our results in the different phases of this search. The percentages of case study publications in the last two columns are relative to the total number in the respective previous column. The table shows that 8–10 per cent of the publications in Strategy, HRM, and Operations report case study research. In Marketing and in Finance the relative contribution of case study research is lower 3–6 per cent. Also, in absolute numbers, most case study research is published in Strategy, HRM, and Operations. In Finance and Marketing, relatively few publications on case study research have been published, and a relatively small propor- tion of these publications have been published in ISI journals. Appendix 2 of this book presents a list of the journals that published five or more papers on case study research between 2000 and 2005.

2.1.2 Case studies in Strategy

In Strategy we found 206 publications on case studies in ISI journals. The journals with most case study publications were International Journal of Operations Production Management, International Journal of Technology Management, and Long Range Planning. Although the International Journal of Operations Production Management is not a Strategy research journal, Chapter 2 Table 2.1 Number of publications with case study research in all scholarly journals in Proquest and in ISI journals in the period 2000–2005 Subject Total number of Number of case study Number of case publications in publications in scholarly study publications scholarly journals in journals in Proquest in ISI journals Proquest database database Strategy 10,166 930 9.1 206 22.2 Finance 13,912 436 3.1 47 10.8 Marketing 4,334 255 5.9 39 15.3 HRM 9,492 778 8.1 153 19.6 Operations 7,457 720 9.7 244 33.9