In the overall doctoral research project, the data were collected in the following three phases: (1) interviewing industry experts and collecting background data to become well informed about and identify the empirical phenomenon for the study, (2) a pilot study with interviews of selected firms considering internationalisation to Norway and/or Russia in the maritime and offshore sector to get deeper insight into the issue, and (3) repeatedly interviewing firms of three groups attempting joint internationalisation to Norway and/or Russia to be able to follow the emergence and development of the phenomenon over time. To start with, the background interviews were conducted with various industry experts (see Table 5) in 2013–2015 in the research projects that I was involved in at the time.
Table 5 Background interviews
Name Title Organisation Time
Backman, Mikael CEO Viking Line 3.4.2013
Heikinheimo, Juha President Napa Oy 9.4.2013
Lainio, Ulla Leading Advisor Finpro 7.11.2014
Manner, Olli President & CEO Elomatic 26.4.2013
Mustamäki, Esko CEO Arctech Helsinki Shipyard 8.4.2013
Mälkiä, Jussi President Meriaura 23.4.2013
Rytkölä, Ilkka General Manager Wärtsilä Ship Power 3.4.2013
Rönnback, Rainer Internationalisation Expert Viexpo 24.2.2015
Takkinen, Markko Commercial Director Antti-Teollisuus Oy 17.4.2013
Vauraste, Tero President & CEO Arctia Shipping 10.4.2013
Viitanen, Ari Director, Customer Solutions Cargotec 30.4.2013
Windischhofer, Richard
Business Development Manager ABB Marine and Crane Services
10.4.2013
Through these interviews, and by attending seminars and project meetings in Finland, Norway, and Russia concerning the developments in the maritime industry and the Arctic region, the studied phenomenon was identified and crystallised, and the basis for the coming phases of the research was set. At the end of 2014, I asked one of the industry experts, a representative of a national export promotion organisation, to provide a list of Finnish maritime and/or offshore
sector SMEs attempting or having attempted internationalisation to Norway and Russia during the previous five years. I approached the listed firms first by email and then by phone, and through discussions with them also obtained connections with additional firms suitable for the study. On this basis, the first interviews were conducted in February–April 2015 with 20 firms based on both criterion and snowball sampling (Fletcher & Plakoyiannaki 2011). This number of interviews was considered adequate as the data started to saturate in terms of views and, given that the number of Finnish SMEs operating in the maritime and offshore industries in both Russia and Norway totalled only 30–40 in 2015 according to the export promotion agency, the number of interviewed firms was considered to cover this population quite well.
The interviewees were CEOs or other persons identified in the firms as responsible for their international operations. It is generally accepted that opportunities are recognised by individuals instead of firms, whereby opportunity recognition should be analysed at the individual or inter-personal level (Ellis 2011). Although many organisational members notice and interpret information about the environment, it is the top manager level where the information converges and is interpreted for organisational action. Opportunity beliefs that lead to strategic action are shaped by top managers’ attention allocation, knowledge structures, and cognitive modes, often irrespective of whether others in the organisation notice similar changes or how they evaluate them. (Shepherd et al. 2017)
The semi-structured interview questions (see Appendix 3) concerned the informants’ views of their firm’s prior, current, and future operations and collaborations towards the Norwegian and/or Russian market, thereby allowing the informants to openly express their views and evaluate their past and future actions. The interviews took place face-to-face or by phone. They were recorded, and the permission for recording was requested and obtained at the beginning of each interview. The interviews constitute the primary data for the pilot study, which were complemented with documents such as information from the firms’ websites and news articles. To respect the anonymity of the interviewees and the firms they represent, names and detailed business information are not disclosed.
Based on the findings of the first round of interviews, I wanted to continue the longitudinal investigation of collective international opportunity recognition (or the lack thereof). For such a study, I had to select inter-firm cases, that is, groups of firms potentially recognising a collective international opportunity, to follow. Five groups of firms were identified based on the pilot interviews, and again through criterion sampling (Fletcher & Plakoyiannaki 2011); three of them were selected for longitudinal observation based on their establishment within the previous two years, whereby the members could recall the process from the beginning. The identified groups were the following: ‘Alpha’ with three key
members, ‘Beta’ with three members, and ‘Omega’ with five members. Some of the interviewed firms were members in more than one group, and altogether six firms were interviewed regularly during the longitudinal investigation period. In addition to those, I continued observing the actions of an eighth firm as it had strong interest in entering the studied market context, either alone or in collaboration with others.
The data generation took place by interviewing the informants of each firm twice a year, altogether from the beginning of 2015 to the end of 2017. This followed the point-mapping technique introduced by Halinen, Medlin, and Törnroos (2012), whereby data are collected as snapshots twice a year, allowing the interviewees to recall the key events well yet also allowing the progress and the emergence of new events between the study points. The interviews were conducted following the same open interview guide and the same practices as described for the pilot study. Unfortunately, it was not possible to interview all the people in every interview round due to the busy schedules of the informants, but with the data gained I received adequate information about the managers’ mental image development in relation to the encountered events and thereby an understanding of how they saw the progress of (collective) internationalisation over time. Eventually, this third longitudinal dataset comprised 29 interviews, whereby the pilot study and longitudinal study phases totalled 49 firm interviews. This dataset was also complemented with information from the websites of the firms and the groups and relevant news articles from the media.
Getting back to selecting a case or multiple ones for the study, the question often arises as to what constitutes a suitable sample size. However, in case study research, the question should not be how many but what for. This does not mean that the number is irrelevant, but the information richness of the cases is an important aspect, too, and overall the cases must be sufficient for the enquiry of which they are part and for the explanation derived from the research. Moreover, it is important to note that what we sample in the beginning of the research project may not be what we realise we ‘cased’ eventually. (Emmel 2013) Instead of fixing the case beforehand, casing takes place along the research process, whereby cases can actually be considered as products of research operations instead of empirical units or theoretical categories. When members of an empirical category, such as firms, are declared to be relevant objects for examining a theoretical idea, they are cased and manipulated by ignoring irrelevant aspects and focusing on theoretically relevant aspects – the empirical world must always be narrowed for practical reasons. Then, the interplay of linking theoretical ideas and empirical evidence produces theoretically structured, meaningful, and useful descriptions of the empirical world, and, eventually, these dynamic cases may be used to refine
the theory that provided the initial guidance (Ragin 1992). A case evolving during a study is a product that cannot be planned in advance (Dubois & Gadde 2002).
In the beginning of the longitudinal data generation, I decided to focus on following the operations and views of three groups of firms, but eventually only one of them was fully reported in this doctoral thesis (in Article 4) due to the limited possibilities for analysing multiple complex cases in one article. The reported case group was selected based on intensity sampling (Fletcher & Plakoyiannaki 2011) as I had the best access to the key informants in this group and had gained the richest data on their views. At the same time, I employed context-sensitive (Poulis et al. 2013), phenomenon-driven case selection (Fletcher et al. 2018) as this case seemed to best exemplify the studied phenomenon in its context based on the overall multi-level story captured about it along the longitudinal interviewing. Consequently, the cases studied in the original articles emerged along with the data analysis and the abductive research process.