Aportaciones realizadas por algunos autores a la transparencia en la

After fundamental choices for the here applied research strategy have been discussed so far, the final two sections of this chapter are concerned with the data collection and analysis processes. The first step in this process is the already described deliberate selection of the first case (termed purposeful sampling by Patton, 2002). As this case promises to be setting the course for the remainder of the study, this selection is highly important. As it has been argued in Section 2.1.2.3, the hub organization is of prime importance for the overall IS development network. Thus, the first case should be one of these hubs. As it has also been discussed already, the IS development industry can be characterized as an oligopoly market, in which a couple of large, globally acting corporations dominate the market (Farhoomand, 2006). Consequently, the first case is one of these globally acting corporations. Thus, the first case is selected due to the

13 Which is a crucial part for a good hypothesis for Kerlinger and Lee (2000).

fact that it’s a crucial case for the research questions, one “that can make a point quite dramatically, or [is], for some reason, particularly important to the scheme of things”

(Patton, 2002, p. 236).

The first case fulfills the requirements posed of this critical case very well. The com-pany has a proven track record of developing standardized IS for over thirty years. With thousands of customers in over one hundred countries worldwide it can be characterized as a truly global company. Finally, with multi-billion dollar revenues, it is truly one of the leading organizations in IS development¹⁴.

In this first case, a round of interviews has been conducted during the spring and summer of 2007. In this round, overall sixteen professionals from various positions in this organization have been interviewed. One interview has been conducted with a member of the top management group of this organization, two interviewees have a more technical background, four are part of the company’s marketing organization, and nine are actively involved in the partner management in some way. The overall structure of the interviewees of this first and the subsequently conducted cases is illustrated in Figure 3.4.

Figure 3.4: Overall Structure of the Cases

These interview partners have been obtained through what Patton (2002) calls snow-ball or chain sampling. In this sampling procedure, preceding interview partners are explicitly asked for further knowledgable interview partners. Then these are interviewed and again asked for further interview partners, and so on. This procedure also has a built-in mechanism for determining when enough interviews have been conducted. As

14 It is acknowledged that this description of the first case company is rather superficial. However, the fact that in the oligopolistic IS development industry only a handful of companies would render any confidentiality of company information that has been promised useless. See Stone (1978, p. 150 ff) for a discussion of the importance of confidentiality especially in organizational research.

Patton (2002, p. 237) phrased it, “the chain of recommended informants would typi-cally diverge initially as many possible sources are recommended, then converge as a few names get mentioned over and over.” This has been exactly the fact, when the fifteenth Interviewee in Case Company A mentioned that all relevant aspects of the partner orga-nization have been covered through the so far conducted interviews. This also conforms with the other advice Patton (2002, p. 244, emphasis added) gives, that “there are no rules for sample size in qualitative inquiry” and that ideally, inquiring should continue until no new evidences emerge, which has been the case in the sixteenth interview.

Due to the fact that all interviewees are professionals that scheduled some of their spare time for the interview, it has been attempted to keep the duration of the interviews deliberately short. As a rough guideline the interviews have been intended to last about one hour. For the first case, the actual interviews had an average duration of slightly more than this one hour. The shortest interview was half an hour long, while the longest lasted for one and a half hours. After the assurance has been made that the data will be treated anonymous, all the interviewees of the first case have agreed to tape recording the interview. Subsequently, for each interview a verbatim transcript has been prepared, which has then been sent to the interviewees to give them opportunity to make individual changes to the transcripts. Most interviewees did not make any adjustments, some clarified their statements, some also removed sections which they wanted to be treated confidentially. The final result of this data collection process is a qualitative data base with more than 180 pages of transcribed interviews with close to 110,000 words. Furthermore, eight out of these sixteen interviewees provided additional information such as official company statements, but also internal reports or individually designed illustrations or figures. All these documents are used for drawing conclusions concerning the first case study.

After this initial case study, a second case has been selected as literal replication of the first. As a literal replication of the hub role, the second case company also fulfills the requirements of that role in the network. That is, it is also a large, globally acing, multi-billion dollar company that has been selected. Again parallel to the first case, a similar round of interviews has been conducted in that company. The number of interviewees has been limited in this second case to eight, again from various different areas of the company. This limitation has been justified, because much of the knowledge that has been initially developed through the interviews in first case could also be applied in the second case. Also after these eight interviews, convergence of potential new interview partners as well as of addressed topics could be observed. The interviews also have been intended to last about an hour, which has been slightly outrange with one hour and seven minutes on average. The shortest interview has been 55 minutes, while the longest lasted about one and a half hour. Again, anonymity has been ensured to the interviewees and all of them have agreed on tape recording the interview. Verbatim transcripts have been made of all tapes, and again the interviewees had the opportunity to adjust their own

interview. The overall data collection resulted in a data base with close to 130 pages of transcribed interviews. The total word count is almost 70,000 for the second case. All in all the second case can rightfully be considered a literal replication of the first.

After this literal replication, several more theoretical replication case studies have been conducted. As Yin (2003, p. 47) argues these replications are supposed to “predict contrasting results but for predictable reasons.” The predictable reason for diverging results from these cases is the fact that they are intentionally not hub organizations, but rather spokes. As it has been a key requirement for these organizations to be of small or medium size, this has been one of the key criteria for the selection of the case companies. In this context, it had to be ensured that the selected companies are no subsidiaries of larger, perhaps even globally acting cooperations. Another constraint has been that, in order to make sure that the selected companies indeed participate in an IS development network, only those have been selected that are officially part of Case Company A’s partner network. Finally, in order to allow for interviewing employees of these organizations only those have been selected that are located within a reachable distance to the author. This approach is probably best subsumed under the heading of criterion sampling as it is described by Patton (2002, p. 238).

In total, 27 companies that fulfill the above described criteria have been contacted by phone and asked whether they wanted to participate in this study. If a general willingness has been expressed these organizations have been further informed in writing, and a personal meeting for conducting an interview has been scheduled. After this procedure an overall of eight companies have actually participated in the study. The conscious criterion to select small companies resulted in a further problem. As some of the spoke case companies had even less then twenty employees, it has been impossible to acquire more than one interview partner for six out of the eight cases. For the other two cases, two and respectively three interviews have been conducted¹⁵. Similar to those in the hub cases, on average the interviews in the spoke cases also lasted about an hour. Two interview partners did not give their approval to tape record the interview. Accordingly for these two interviews no verbatim transcript could be made. Rather, comprehensive notes have been taken by both the author and an assisting graduate student that has been brought along specifically for this task (Patton, 2002). For all the other interviews, verbatim transcripts have been made, and the same procedure as for the two other

15 This is especially problematic due to what Yin (2003, p. 75) calls “undesired confusion between unit of data collection and unit of analysis.” Under this heading, Yin (2003, p. 76) describes the fact that “confusion begins because the data collection sources may be individual people (...), whereas the unit of analysis of your case study may be organizational (...) - a frequent design when the case study is about an organization.” Thus, similar to the approach of the two hub case analyses, also for the spokes other materials, such as official documents are also used. However, again owing to the ensured anonymity of both participant and their organizations, these documents are only implicitly used and not directly quoted.

cases has been followed in order to ensure the interviewees’ approval of this transcript.

Overall, the transcribed interviews for the spoke cases resulted in a total of 85 pages and more than 50,000 words of qualitative data.