Chapter 2: Case studies in business research

Review articles on case study research show that many case studies suffer from a lack of scientific rigour.

1.3.3 Chapter 3: Principles of research

In Chapter 3 we discuss general principles of research. We make a dis- tinction between practice-oriented research and theory-oriented research, and discuss general features of research objectives for each of these two types. We define “practice” and we formulate the aim of practice-oriented research: to contribute to the knowledge through research of practitioners in order to support them in acting effect- ively. When we focus on theory-oriented research, we define theory as a system of statements propositions about relations between con- cepts that describe aspects of the object of study in a domain of instances of that object of study. We distinguish three types of activity that contribute to theory development; exploration gathering infor- mation from a variety of sources, theory-building research develop- ing propositions through research, and theory-testing research testing propositions through research. We claim that replication is essential for making a theory robust and for assessing its “generaliz- ability”. We argue that generalizability is not a characteristic of the results of a study, but a characteristic of the theory, which needs to be achieved through replications.

1.3.4 Chapter 4: Theory-testing research general

Chapter 4 further focuses on theory-testing research in general. A theory can only be tested properly if its propositions are specified in detail. We formulate four types of propositions: A is a sufficient condition for B “if there is A there will be B”, A is a necessary condition for B “B exists only if A is present”, a deterministic relation between A and B “if A is higher, then B is higher”, and a probabilistic relation between A and B “if A is higher then it is likely that B is higher”. We argue that the choice of a research strategy i.e. making a choice between an experi- ment, a survey, and a case study depends on the type of proposition. For each type of proposition, a specific strategy is preferred, second best, or third best. Despite the widespread belief that case study research is not an appropriate research strategy for theory-testing, we argue that the case study is actually the preferred research strategy for the testing of specific types of proposition, if an experiment