Abstract
Since the South Asian Journal of Business and Management Cases has transitioned in the past two and a half years from a teaching case journal to a qualitative case study research journal, there has been a spike in queries on how to go about writing a research case. A common query is ‘I have an organization that is willing to let us write case on them, but we don’t know where to start and which questions to ask’. This editorial aims to provide some tips on how an uninitiated case author can start working on a case.
One thing that needs to be remembered is that this is particularly from the point of view of writing qualitative case study research and, in general, for case research. Case study research is still an unchartered territory for many researchers. It is expected that the reader can unambiguously differentiate between a teaching case and a case study research. Moreover, there is no one way to address the issue; different scholars find their own ways. What we are suggesting here has worked for us and liked by our readers.
Follow Your Philosophical Instinct
Each individual has a worldview of how things happen, which further influences how you study your areas of interest. By areas of interest, we are not focusing on functional areas such as HR, finance, marketing (although they are important in case research), but on whether you are intrigued by societal-level dynamics, organizational-level dynamics, group-level dynamics or individual-level dynamics. By worldview, we mean your philosophical underpinning, your ontological stance. Let’s assume your worldview is that there is no absolute truth and things are subjective and relative, your interest area is group-level dynamics and you wish to study team effectiveness. Now, you may study how each team member works for the final goals and how their individual ways help in reaching the final goals. If your worldview is objective, you may study their ways of working towards final goal, but instead of capturing their individuality you may try to understand a common pattern and disregard individual deviations. The differing philosophical stances will trigger a chain of influences. Starting with what you wish to explore, your research objectives, your data collection and analysis process.
Hence, one needs to be true to their own philosophical underpinning, to be able to efficiently study a phenomenon. Otherwise, you will fail to do justice with your research. Commonly a scholar with subjectivist stance opts to get into a case study research, as the design itself calls for an in-depth study, hence leaving out deviations may not provide a robust finding. Nonetheless, objectivist scholars have been doing case study research for decades. See works built on Robert Yin’s and Katheleen Eisenhardt’s approach to case study research. A beginner with either interpretivist or constructivist worldview may find it easy to relate with research case writing. A positivist approach may help in writing an event-/context-driven and discussion-based teaching case.
Although philosophical stances are overlooked, it is a fact that our research is always driven by them. Not following the same, may leave a researcher unsatisfied with their work, and defending it becomes a challenge.
Case or No Case
The case study method ‘explores a real-life, contemporary bounded system (a case) or multiple bounded systems (cases) over time, through detailed, indepth data collection involving multiple sources of information … and reports a case description and case themes’ (Creswell, 2013, p. 97).
Doing case study research is about studying a phenomenon within a matching and focused context through a case and explaining the same theoretically. In Volume 10.1, we have laid down the nuances of phenomenon, context and theory. Hence, to qualify to be a case study research, one needs to identify an interesting phenomenon in a confined context (bounded system). Wherein a case or few cases (organization, individual, event, incident) should be able to sufficiently help in studying that phenomenon to develop deeper understanding. For Instance, to understand how some organizations bounce back from disasters (phenomenon) while others fail, one needs to identify an organization that could emerge successful from a disaster and use it as a case unit. If you use one organization, it will be a single case research. If you choose two or three such organizations, it could be multi-case research. The purpose of studying multiple cases is not to generalize the findings but to understand the differences and the similarities between the cases. Multiple case studies can be used to either augur contrasting results for expected reasons or interpret why results in the studies are similar. You may also choose to compare a failed and a successful organization, to do comparative case research study.
Either way, a case study research is used in one of the four situation as stated by Yin (2018). When a case is depicting a unique or extreme phenomenon, that is, it has not been seen before. Second, it could be when you are studying a longitudinal phenomenon. The third situation could be when the case is revealing, by which we mean the phenomenon wasn’t easily accessible for study and you get a change to study that, like how insider trading works. Finally, you can choose to do a case study research when one case or few case units can help you study a regular or everyday phenomenon, for instance, studying how street vendors in a particular locality attract customers. Hence, it is important to know when to do a case study research and when not to.
Identifying a Phenomenon
We often get questions like ‘I have an organization that has agreed to let us do a case on them but how do I go about it’. Answering that question is never easy, because we do not know what you wish to study, why you approached that organization or what the organization agreed for. However, we do suggest that if you do have an accessible case unit, see whether it qualifies to be a case or not. Create a checklist of the points mentioned in the previous section. Is the phenomenon interesting, is the context relevant, is the case unit sufficient to study it. Do not worry about the theory from the start. We suggest that before approaching to the organization, you should ensure about the phenomenon as well as the context and match them well. The context should be bounded enough so as to allow you to study the phenomenon unhindered.
But how to observe a phenomenon. Again, there is no toolbox for it. The only thing that works is your eyes and ears for catching something interesting. As a researcher it is important to be very observant of your surroundings. It could be observed in your day-to-day life, or you have read or heard something in the news, or someone told you about some organization which is doing things differently. Either way, you should not start by identifying a case but a phenomenon. A phenomenon is a relevant happening which is observable. At the same time, as it was mentioned in the editorial of Volume 10.1, context is equally important to do a case study research. What we wish to emphasize here is that a context changes the dynamics of a phenomenon. Taking from our previous example of how some organizations successfully dealing with disaster, one may find only few such organizations in a particular place, hence it may make it a unique or unusual case. But if you are a person who lives in a place that is prone to disasters, and you observe that all organizations in that area have been bouncing back from disasters time and again, then your context becomes extremely relevant, as it has changed the dynamics of the phenomenon of organizations bouncing back from disasters.
Thus, the only thumb rule when trying to identify a phenomenon is being consciously aware about your surroundings, as you may end up observing an interesting phenomenon. We strongly advise not to approach a case unit (organization, individual, event) unless you are clear about the phenomenon you wish to study in a given context.
Learning About the Current Literature
Case researchers, who are in a learning phase, also find it difficult to understand when to start connecting with literature. Due to the positivist anxiety, they start looking for a gap in literature and create assumptions from there. A case study research is primarily an inductive process; hence the literature should not be visited to develop assumptions. It can be instead approached with a lens of learning about two things. Is there any literature available in the phenomenon that I am observing? If yes, what kind of work has been done, are there case study research written on it. If you see that very similar study in a very similar context has been done, you may drop the study. Or you may see limitations in those study and try to capture that in your case study research.
Second, you see the literature to learn how other researchers have done similar work (qualitative case study research). How have they developed their study, what kind of research questions they have addressed, what data they have collected, what was the analysis process, how do they present their findings and how do they establish their contribution.
Hence, instead of looking for gaps to develop assumptions, one should use literature to learn about the current knowledge, understand limitations in the phenomenon studied and the process of doing case study research.
It Is an Inductive Approach
You may take the work of any proponent of case study research, irrespective of their philosophical underpinning, they all echo that case study research is an inductive approach. Hence, you are required to do a bottom-up study, where you allow the data to reach the theory or theorizing. It is important to remember that case study research is a research design and is based on a scientific process. Hence, one should not forget its basic premise that is a data-driven strategy and not assumptions driven.
The seven cases in this issue will provide a clear picture as to how the above-mentioned points manifest when working with a case study research. In the first article Biswas, De, Subalova and Ghosh, propose a generalizable dynamic capability process model by studying how facing multiple crises allow innovation which gradually becomes a core competence of the firm.
In the second case, Abobkar provides an integrative framework for enabling and disabling intentionally developed organizational community of practices. His data-driven study extends the understanding of the concept of community of practice in the area of knowledge management.
In the next case, Hiltunen, Holopainen and Li investigate the intersection of the phenomenon of profitability and business ethics, through the lens of sensemaking. Their data-driven study concludes that profitability is not an outcome of customer satisfaction, rather a sensemaking process of its surroundings.
The following case theorizes that entrepreneurial activities can be driven by religion as a dominant logic. Amanbayev, Aljanova, Mirzaliyeva and Ghosh’s bottom-up study proposes a process model of how religion can be an influencer in study of entrepreneurship.
Fifth case in this issue by Sinha and Kerani study the phenomenon of stakeholder activism wherein they showcase the influence of proxy advisors in decision-making about the appointment of top management.
Kumar, Suhaib and Asjad, in the next case study, propose a transformational framework for the sports good manufacturing industry to transition and sustain in the Industry 4.0 scenario, using decision-making tree and laboratory-based analysis.
The final case by Bhattacharya, Rupainwar and Kumar present customer interaction model in the telemedicine industry which rose in the wake of the pandemic.
All the above cases used in-depth analysis and their findings were driven by data. They all encountered an interesting phenomenon which they explored in a given context. We would like to leave you with the final words that doing qualitative case study research initially requires more effort than other types of research. However, its in-depth nature allows better chances of contribution to the literature on the phenomenon being study. It is important to remember that one has to do a lot of reading on how to do a qualitative case study research and start practicing their learnings; there are no shortcuts.
Do you now feel confident to craft a case study research?