La historia no escrita de la resistencia

Sampling is an issue in different areas of the research process. A sampling strategy cannot be formulated generally, but needs to be adjusted for every sampling individually. In this study, sampling was an issue when selecting the organisations for the case study, analysing documents and interview partners, and also when selecting a sample for the questionnaire in the validation study. The proper explanation of the chosen sampling strategy and the description of the sample is an important quality issue for qualitative studies (Tonette, 2010).

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As it lies with the nature of this study’s approach, when creating the sample selection for the organisations that serve in the case study, a random sampling approach would not offer efficient opportunities of finding the needed conditions and environment. This does of course mean that statistical representativeness can never be achieved, but by the suitable choice of cases from the perspective of the research question, this is neither targeted nor needed. This bias would be a weakness in quantitative research, while here it shows the intended focus and therefore creates a strength that of course depends on the quality of the selection criteria and the underlying research questions (Patton, 2002;

Saunders et al., 2009). As the purpose of this study is to find organisations that are already facing a challenging situation on the labour market, an extreme or deviant case sampling would best match the needs (Flyvbjerg, 2006). Therefore, the focus needs to be on information-rich cases that are unusual or special (Patton, 2002). To ensure this, the selection of the organisations under investigation needs to be clarified. General criteria were:

• The organisations needed to stand out in the sense that they are operating their Human Resource Department at a high level and making active use of the opportunities given to them through their position in the stakeholder network.

• The organisations needed to be in a challenging situation concerning their industry’s labour market. This means that although they have an efficient and well-executed HRM, they (or most of the organisations in the industry) are struggling to fill vacancies and expect the situation to become more challenging through the demographic change.

• Access to the organisation’s decision makers was crucial as a power promoter for the access to interviewees and documents.

These criteria do not represent an exhaustive list of things to look for. They formed the basis for the search that led to the finding of the best possible organisations for this study. It had been decided that two organisations were the optimal number of cases to investigate.

More than two cases would exceed the available resources for this study, but still offer more insights and lower risks than an investigation into a single case (Yin, 2009). The

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two selected organisations fulfil all of the criteria mentioned above. In a multi-case design this selection is referred to as replication. It means that the intention of the careful selection of the two cases is to predict similar results despite eventual different situations the organisations are in (Yin, 2009). The demographically influenced situation in the European labour market does not stop at borders and therefore the chosen two organisations are from different, but neighbouring countries.

The following table provides an overview on the characteristics of the chosen organisations in Germany and Switzerland. An intention of this provided table here is not to discuss the details of the characteristics, but to provide a first insight about the organisations which also sets the border for this study.

Table 5: Comparison of the characteristics of the two cases

A detailed description of the mentioned characteristics of the German and the Swiss organisation is provided in Chapter 6.1.1.

As mentioned in the literature review, case studies have already been successfully used to investigate HR issues and the stakeholder perspective. Single case studies, such as Ulmer (2001) and Lamberg et al. (2008) have shown that investigating one case can be

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beneficial. The selection of the two organisations might allow an even deeper understanding while taking into consideration different degrees of involvement with the stakeholder networks. As mentioned above, due to the given resources, a multiple-case study with more than two organisations as done by Garavan (1995) is not possible and also not necessary to answer the research questions. The two chosen organisations want to stay anonymous which is not unusual. Tsai et al. faced a similar situation when they investigated the stakeholder influence on strategy (2005). Based on that, the two organisations are here referred to as the German and the Swiss organisation.

3.4.2 Sampling for the pilot study

The sampling for the pilot study was important to test the data collection for the following interviews. As it was already originally intended to interview the two HR managers of the organisations as well as employees who are partly involved in recruitment activities, both of these types of interviews needed to be tested. Therefore, the author selected and contacted two HR managers. One worked for a Swiss company, while one worked for a German company. In addition to that, two people working for a Swiss and a German company being involved in recruitment activities had also been selected. This so-called key informant sampling allowed the author to test the prepared interview guides with both types of interview partners (HR and ordinary employee, respectively line managers) as well as in both countries which had the potential to test eventual cultural or legal differences which may have played a role for the further data collection (Yin, 2009). It was not necessary to differentiate that much between the two different organisations in regards of the preparation of the interview. That is because the intention of the pilot study was to concentrate more on the core questions, which are directly linked to the research question and sub-questions. It was any way necessary to adapt this original interview guide to the specific given conditions of the two organisations. So for this, the used key informant sampling described fit very well for the purpose of the pilot study

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3.4.3 Sampling of documents and interview partners

When it came to the sampling of the documents that needed to be analysed, the sampling was generally due to the amount of documents available and the degree of access that was granted. The approach here was to not only rely on internal documents, but to also analyse some of the publicly available information as well (for further details please see Chapter 6.1).

For the in-depth interviews, the sampling of the interview partners is of major importance. In this kind of qualitative interview, the degree of potential insight is the main criteria for the selection. Therefore, it was most beneficial to select internal interview partners based on promising background information to gain this deep insight.

Those were: recruited via different channels, different levels of hierarchy, working in different departments and also previous employments. Furthermore, potential interview partners were selected due to their degree of insight into the stakeholder network, their degree of engagement with external stakeholders, their availability and of course their willingness to participate (please see Chapter 5.4 for research ethics). Besides them, the HR managers served as interviewees as well. In chapter 5.1.2 two tables for the German and the Swiss organisation are provided. They present detailed information on every individual interview partner.

All in all, nine interviews within the Swiss organisation and ten interviews within the German organisation were needed to explore the full richness of information in the network that allowed it to answer the research question. The used sampling for this study fulfils the criteria of Glaser (1978) to be called a theoretical sampling.

3.4.4 Sampling for the validation study

For the validation study, the same sampling that was used for the in-depth interviews was applied. This means that all interview partners were invited to participate in the validation study. This allowed for mirroring the findings back to the people involved in the data collection process, which in turn created a good basis for the testing of validity (Bryman & Bell, 2011).

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