Case selection How to design and conduct a practice-oriented case study

definitely tells us whether the hypothesis is true for this practice if the test is conducted in a case or cases from within that practice or for very similar situations if the test is conducted in a case or cases that are very similar to the practice situation to which the study is oriented. Test results, therefore, have direct implications for the practitioner’s options for action. The result of a successful hypothesis-building study is a hypothesis, or a set of hypotheses, of which it is known by means of the practice of initial testing that they are true in the set of selected cases from which these hypotheses have emerged. Before the generated hypothesis can be considered true for the practice to which the study is oriented, it must first be tested in a next hypothesis-testing study. The exception to this rule is the situation in which the hypothesis was built by studying the entire practice to which the research is oriented e.g. if a hypoth- esis was built about a relation between a department’s management team’s style and the department’s performance in all departments of a company. In the latter case a fact regarding this practice has been discovered and no further testing is needed. The result of good descriptive practice-oriented research is a true or valid description of types of variables complaints, practices, strategies that definitely exist in the described range of values or types in the instances in which they were identified. This result is “true” for the prac- tice if the entire practice to which the research is oriented was studied. Chapter 11 Box 15 A practice-oriented “flash case study” Refer to Flowchart 1. Preparation phase 1. Define research topic ■ In this book we define the terms “proposition” and “hypothesis” as having dis- tinct meanings. We define a proposition as a part of a theory and a hypothesis as a part of a study. We noticed that some of our colleagues used these terms as synonyms. This alerted us to the possibility that we used these words in an idiosyncratic way. 2. Define general research objective see Flowchart 3 ■ We wanted to do a quick practice-oriented case study to find out if the distinc- tion that we make between the terms hypothesis and proposition is accepted in the field of business research.