Choice of Sites

The first step in the field work involved a search for companies meeting the above criteria. An important question arose in the beginning with regard to what organisational level of analysis should be adopted. Researching complete, multiple-site companies was thought to be advantageous in that it would facilitate a comprehensive

assessment of production processes in their entirety as well as the work organisation arrangements set up around them. Nonetheless, business units which were part of larger business entities, were identified as sufficiently appropriate for the purpose of this study. Subsidiaries or plants, rather than whole businesses, were also considered. In fact, the vast majority of the researched companies were linked to larger organisations in one way or another^ Such a decision was justified on the grounds that the emphasis in this study had to be on business units as places of work. Plants, even those in the same company, might have different levels of IM, so aggregating data to the company level would have been problematic, mainly because of the scattered geographical layout of the companies whose local sites were sampled initially. As will be explained further in the foregoing section, out of a total of 47 companies that responded to an invitation questionnaire to indicate whether they would agree to take part in the research, 30 (i.e. 63.83%) were subsidiaries of larger companies that had other sites in Britain or/and elsewhere in the world, 14 (i.e. 29.79%) were parent companies, and 3 (i.e. 6.38%) did not reveal their legal status.

The decision was also justified on the basis that the emphasis of this study was on the plant as a socio-technical system^. Scotland's entire discrete part manufacturing engineering industry was surveyed initially, if ambitiously, to identify appropriate companies for the study. Later, however, the search was narrowed down to target companies which were closer to St. Andrews for purely logistical reasons.

The "new" electronics industry in Scotland presented itself as favourite for the field work. The electronics industry is a major nominee for progress towards CIM since CAD/CAM techniques began in it and diffused successfully into chemicals, construction and mechanical engineering industries (see Bessant et al., 1985; Susman and Chase, 1986). Traditional, long-established industries in Scotland (e.g. ship­ building, heavy engineering and mining industries) had declined to make way for this

"replacement" industry. Growth of the service and financial industries is another aspect

1 Companies 6 and 7 wore the exception in that they were independent small family businesses.

^Had the study conceptualised the plant as a purely technical production process or economic entity or been concerned, for example, with analysing total assets of a company, supply chains of a homogenous sample of a population or global marketing strategies of multinational firms, it would have required a strict choice of units such that uniformity at a corporate level was met. This would have been applicable as a crucial criterion of selection in order to establish a complete picture of the company or companies under investigation. A similar position to the one taken in this study was adopted by researchers such as Dean and Snell (1991), for example, in tlieir study of CIM job design requirements in US plants. Currie (1988) also took up a resembling stance in studying management perceptions of CAD in British companies.

of such replacement in Scotland's economic life^. Both replacement industries in the manufacturing and service sectors are major users of computer technologies in their operations. The electronics manufacturing industry sector, as opposed to the service sector, appealed, as a potential area of field work, one that was readily within the researcher's reach, both physically and in terms of the researcher's training background.

Initially, SelVs Scottish Directory (1991/92) was used for Sampling‘S. A nationwide list of 274 firms resulted. This was too large a sample for the purpose of this study and had to be reduced. Eventually, it was whittled down to 90. The elimination process was governed by two criteria: applicability (according to the criteria outlined in section 4.3) and location.

Each of the 90 companies was invited to participate in the study. In total, 70 companies (i.e. 78%) declined participation either actively or passively. The response rate was 52%; 47 companies replied by completing and returning a purpose-developed invitation form (see Appendix B) in a prepaid stamped envelope. Out of these 27 companies (i.e. 30% of the total of 90 companies) declined the invitation but a total of 20 companies (i.e. 22%) agreed to take pait in the study.

Exhibit 4.1 shows a flow chart illustrating the procedure followed in company selection. Only 10 companies, including eight subsidiaries and two parent firms, out of these 20 (i.e. 11% of the original sample of 90 and 50% of the "accepting" respondents) eventually collaborated in the study^.

^One of the people who were interviewed repetitively during the course of this research lived and worked for over thirty years in Scotland. He described this situation in the following words:

“... you only have to look back over 20 years. W e've been before - Fife used to be - a heavy engineering and coal mining area ... Heavy engineering died W hen coal started to be phased out and oil came in coal mines in the Fife area all started to be closed down .... the district of Kirkcaldy, Methil, Cowdenbeath ... all these kinds of areas. Then these kinds o f companies came along and were set up here because there was a wealtli of skilled p e o p le ” (Case 8).

^Manufacturers under the following industry headings were listed, studied and then classified: "computers", "microcomputers", "electrodes", "electronic components", "electronic equipment", "electronic instruments", "electronic systems", "electronics", "electronic medical apparatus" and "medical equipment".

^Two companies closed down, six were located in the extreme north, west and south of Scotland, one was not suitable for the purpose of the study because it was not a user of the technology in concern, and one company changed their mind after initially agreeing to participate.

Exhibit 4.1

Company selection procedure

r I n i t i a l S a m p l i n g 1r 2 7 4 C o m p a n i e s F u r t h e r ( S c r e e n ) S a m p l u i g C o m p a n i e s I d e n t i f y i n g C o n t a c t P e r s o n ( U s i n g T e l e p h o n e ) S e n d i n g I n v i t a t i o n F o r m s C o m p a n y D e c i s i o n ? 4 7 R e s p o n d i n g C o m p a n i e s ( 5 2 % ) Y e s / C o m p a n y D e c i s i o n ? 2 7 C o m p a n i e s D e c l i n i n g I n v i t a t i o n ( 3 0 % ) 2 0 C o m p a n i e s A c c e p t i n g i n v i t a t i o n ( 2 2 % ) 4 3 N o n ~ r e s p o n d in g C o m p a n i e s ( 4 8 % ) M o s t i m i t a o l e 1 0 C o m p a n i e s C h o s e n f o r th e F i e l d W o r k E N D S a m p l i n g & S T A R T F i e l d W o r k ( G o t o E x h i b i t 4 . 4 )

Three out of the 90 companies sampled could not withstand the early 1990s economic recession and thus closed down. It was not an easy time either for businesses or their researchers^.

Fife companies were given priority because of their proximity to St. Andrews since the nature of the data-gathering mechanism deployed in this study required frequent visits and, at times, the continuous presence of the researcher on the researched companies’ sites^, Fife Regional Council's publication "The Fife Business Directory"(l9S9Ÿ was consulted for further information about these companies. Eventually, seven of these turned out to be among the 10 cases in the study.

The next step involved extending the geographical scope of the field and, hence the addition of two Tayside and one Lothian sites to have what was considered to be a reasonably sufficient number of cases for an intensive and exploratory study,