Evaluations of case study research

case selection criteria, measurement, and analysis. Also Meredith 2002 noted that case study methodology is often not well understood and not applied rigorously.

2.3 Conclusion

Whereas other researchers have investigated the use of case study research in a specific field, we provide an analysis of the broad field of business in the recent period 2000–2005. This allows us to compare the different business subfields. First of all, we observe that there are substan- tially more publications in ISI journals using case research on the subjects of Strategy, HRM, and Operations Management compared to only a few in Finance and Marketing. This conclusion is true for both absolute num- bers and relative percentages compared to the total number of publica- tions in the field. Furthermore, the case-based publications on Finance and Marketing topics do not appear in the core Finance and Marketing journals. This indicates that case study research is not a well-accepted method in Finance and Marketing research. The Operations Manage- ment case study publications, on the other hand, appear mainly in core operations management and operations research journals. Also in areas of HRM and Strategy, case study research is published in the respective core journals. We observe that publications related to these fields appear as well in Operations Management and Marketing journals. When we compare the review of the methodological papers with our findings from the first part of this chapter, we observe some gaps. First, while many authors advocate the use of case study research for either exploratory purposes or theory-testing, we found previously that cases are 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. Second, review articles on case study research show that many case studies suffer from a lack of scientific rigour. It is against this background that this book was written in order to emphasize and clearly illustrate the usefulness of case study research for theory-testing, and how scientific rigour can be obtained.

2.4 References

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