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The principle of dialogical reasoning requires the researcher to confront his or her preconceptions (prejudices) that guided the original research design with the data that emerges through the research process. Further, the principle also suggests that the researcher should make the historical intellectual basis of their research as transparent as possible to the reader and herself. Several revisions have been undertaken which are discussed as follows:

 The researcher began with the desire to understand the factors that affect e-commerce adoption in SMEs with a preconception that most SME websites in Botswana were

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actively engaged in e-commerce for income generation. This was not the case at the time fieldwork began, so the definition of e-commerce was adopted to fit the developing country environments as described by Jain & Jain (2011) &Humphrey et al., (2003). This change in focus caused the researcher to redefine the understanding of e-commerce adoption in Botswana SMEs not as end in itself but also as a means to accomplishing goals for an organisation through the various processes. The research questions for the study were thus modified to reflect this shift in focus.

 Another aspect that necessitated the change in emphasis is the definition of e- commerce for this study. Since e-commerce is a phenomenon that is defined differently by various scholars depending on the scope and context of analysis, it was necessary that the definition suits the developing country context of Botswana. For example, e-commerce in this study has been defined as the process of buying, selling, transferring, or exchanging products, services, and/or information based on the following prevailing conditions in developing countries: 1) that Internet and e-mail are easily available in these contexts and will be used to communicate business transactions, and/or 2) the use of the World Wide Web (in short, the web) to enhance business activity (Turban, King, McKay, Marshall, Lee, & Viehland, 2008). This definition therefore accommodated minimum conditions for e-commerce adoption in organisations as well as individual consumers in the urban or rural areas of developing countries. On the other hand, the definition also accommodated firms that were transacting at a high level using website functionalities such as online orders, payments, and some web 2.0 functionalities (Bell & Loane, 2010; Scupola, 2010; Hong & Zhu, 2006). Thus, the definition allowed e-commerce adoption to be viewed at the contextual level of developing countries such as Botswana and at the same time taking a global view as the ultimate goal for external markets.

 There was a shift in focus in the number of cases that were targeted for the study. Originally, the researcher had planned to cover nine cases but three cases, C7Panda, C8Estate, and C9AutoCo, had been presenting some challenges regarding further

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follow-up. Thus, the researcher had decided to abandon these cases from further fieldwork as they were unable to comply with the requirement for follow-up interviews. C7Panda had been keen to participate in the study but the tight schedule of the manager made it difficult to secure further investigations. However, the manager’s view was that there was nothing new to learn from the future interactions that were being requested for as he felt that pertinent issues relating to the study had already been relayed. Other managers in the firm had not been released to participate in the research. C8Estate also felt that they had participated enough in the study by providing two interview sessions with the researcher and thus they reasoned that no new information would be gathered from follow-up interviews. The owner manager and the finance manager participated in the study. C9Autoco could not abide by the follow-up arrangements because of the tight schedule of the manager. Later, during evaluations of this study, it was resolved that all information that was gathered in these three SMEs was valuable although the richness of the information was not desirable according to the researcher’s perspective. The final presentation of the results now incorporates all the nine cases although the rich insights may be observed in the first six SMEs, and relatively brief accounts in C7Panda, and C8Estate. The last case, C9Autoco had very minimal interactions with the researcher.

 I had planned to analyse the data using the RBT combined with Contextualism as an overarching theory. However, some retrospective analysis could not defend this idea as it appeared to be motivated from the deterministic and objectivist perspective of the positivist tradition. Therefore, all e-commerce adoption theories as reviewed in section 2.4 were employed to analyse the case findings in the selected SMEs.

 I had also planned to use Nvivo 8, a software package for data analysis based on previous literature on interpretive studies. This was later dropped when it was learnt that the application could not assist in making iterative analysis of the various narratives obtained from the informants. I therefore employed personal analysis of data, comparing and reflecting on the themes that were being raised in the cases, making a

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variety of integrated analysis to derive meaning from the data as guided by Miles & Huberman, 1994).