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No research strategy is inherently superior or inferior to any other (Saunders et al. 2007). Thus, part of the methodological process is determining what specific research design (or combination of research designs) is to be used to allow the researcher to answer the research questions and fulfil the study’s objectives. Part of that process, however, must also include a consideration of alternative designs and an articulation of the theoretical or practical reasons to why they have been discounted. This section will describe briefly some of the competing methods, highlighting strengths and weaknesses and the reasons why they have not been applied in this piece of research. It will be organised as follows: section 3.5.1 will look at the survey method; 3.5.2 will look at action research; and 3.5.3 will look an ethnographic design before concluding the section in 3.5.4. The purpose here is twofold: first, to begin to understand alternative methods for approaching the research problem so that they may guide future research into the contextualisation of the scenario planning process, and secondly, to strengthen the justification for choosing a case study method to guide the empirical portion of this thesis.

3.5.1 Survey Research

The survey method is associated primarily with a deductive, quantitative approach that is adept at answering ‘who, what, where, how much, and how many’ type of questions (Saunders et al. 2007). They are suited to collecting large amounts of data from a sizeable population, often using a standardised questionnaire that allows straightforward cross- comparison (Thietart 2001)42_{. Although a survey method could have been used to sample the}

40,000 people employed by the organisations represented on the Fife Partnership, it is difficult to ascertain how much value could have been gained into determining how an organisation uses scenario planning to inform the strategic planning process. The scenario planning process involved only the most senior people from each organisation and was used, primarily, to inform the community planning process—something which also involves only a handful of employees outside of the executive offices of the Partnership organisations. One way a survey could have been used is to try to sample the workforce of each organisation in an attempt to detect a change in opinion as to how the organisation is performing in the wake of a scenario planning process. For example, while a survey method could investigate the assumptions stipulated in 2.1.3 (that scenario planning causes an increase in organisational awareness which should then cause an increase in performance), there are a number of issues that may restrict or diminish its success. Firstly, because scenario planning is used to inform the Community Plan it may be more of an assessment of that plan and the impact it is having/has had rather than contributing any knowledge to the role of scenario planning as part of the wider planning process. Secondly, the sheer size, political orientation and bureaucratic nature of the organisations comprising the Fife Partnership may impede the ability to detect what kind of an impact the scenario planning processes had on the community planning process. One possibility was to survey the individual members of the Fife Partnership over the last ten years and a selection of other people involved with the process, however, after much consideration, it was decided that a more qualitative approach using open, in-depth interviews with many of those involved would provide greater insight into how the process was managed and the extent to which scenario planning informed

42 _{For details of the procedures involved in a survey method, see Albreck and Settle (1989), Fink and Kosecoff (1998),} and Schuman and Presser (1996).

strategy. At a point when the scenario-to-strategy process is better understood, a survey method may provide a more rounded and wider impression of the impact of scenario planning and its relation to performance and social amelioration. However, given the current state of the literature and lack of theoretical and practical discussion of the scenario-informed planning process, a more in-depth and insightful method was needed.

3.5.2 Action Research

The aim of action research is to contribute to the “practical concerns of people in an immediate problematic situation and to the goals of social science by joint collaboration within a mutually accepted ethical framework” (Rappoport 1970: 499). It has become a term that represents four common themes in the management research literature, and differs from other research strategies in its explicit focus on action and the promotion of change within an organisation. Table 3.7 (below) provides a brief overview of the four themes:

Table 3.7 - Action research

Action Research Action Research

Theme Description

Research in Action not Research

about Action (Coghlan and Brannick 2005)

Research is concerned with the resolution of organisational issues, e.g., implications of change and the experience of those initiating or involved.

Collaboration between

Practitioners and Researchers The researcher is part of the research because they are part of the organisation and thus the change process (Eden and Huxham 1996).

Iterative process of diagnosing,

planning, taking action, and

evaluating

This action research spiral is usually focused within a set context and has a clearly expressed objective (see Robson 2002). Diagnosis occurs to enable action planning and a decision about the action and a decision about the actions to be taken, which is then evaluated.

Development of Theory Action research should have implications that reach beyond the current project and should be conceived specifically to inform other contexts and develop theory (Eden and Huxham 1996).

Source: Adapted from Saunders et al. (2007: 140-142)

Although action research is well-suited to ‘how’ orientated research questions, the reasons for not using an ‘action-based’ design in this case are more practical than theoretical. While acknowledging the potential insights this research design could provide into how the scenario planning process informs, and thus changes, the community planning process, to understand

the extent of the impact of the scenario planning process upon community planning in Fife, the research would have needed to begin as far back as 2000 and continued on until at least the end of 2007, which, in the case of doctoral research, the researcher had neither the time nor financial resources to do. Perhaps a possible future study would be a piece of action research carried out into the scenario-to-strategy process over a shorter, more focused timeframe.

3.5.3 Ethnographic research

The ontological and epistemological foundations of this research may have suited the inductive nature of an ethnographic study. From it anthropological roots, ethnography seeks to describe and explain the social world in the way the subjects themselves would (see Goetz and LeCompte 1984; Fetterman 1989; Gioia and Chittipeddi 1991). Although ethnography is an approach that can yield valuable insights into a particular context to better understand the views of those involved—something which would be of value to the research question—the immersion needed to study the social world of the research subjects (Saunders et al. 2007) would have been too time consuming if applied to community planning in Fife. Also, the partisan political dimension of the council may have made such observation difficult, especially after the change in administration following the 2007 elections—although arguably a finding in and of itself, ethnographic research requires almost total access, which a political organisation may not want to grant. The ethnographic approach is subject to the same temporal and financial restrictions which ruled out an action research design, however there are also more theoretical reasons which pertain to the nature of the research questions and the objective of the study. The focus of the research is on wider strategic involvement of scenario planning, and thus a purely ethnographic study would have to expand throughout most departments, services, and committees of Fife Council to try and understand the impact of the scenario planning process. To do this thoroughly would require a team of researchers, thus, it was determined that it would be more prudent to employ an alternative approach.

3.5.4 Method Justification

This section has described some of the competing research designs and although consideration was given to these alternative methods, it was decided that a case study approach, with its multiple methods of data gathering, provides the longitudinal depth needed to offer a full and complete picture of how scenario planning can inform the organisation’s strategic planning process within the practical limitations stipulated above. As was shown, there is significant value in the other approaches, which will hopefully be pursued in due course, but for this thesis, the central research design is an in-depth case study, which will be the subject of the ensuing section.