Pilot Study

The objective of the pilot study of this research was to help to develop the relevant line of questions, and refine the data collection design with respect to both content of the data and the procedure to be followed (Blumberg et al., 2005, Yin, 2009). The pilot study was conducted by adopting face to face interviews, limited looks at documentations and a one- month company observation. The interviews were with five persons including the vice general manager of case organization, who is one of the decision makers, two department middle managers, and two office staff who all had experience with prior change events.

The results of the pilot study provide considerable insight into the basic issue being studied and show several important implications. Firstly, the pilot study was done before the selection of any specific change events for this research, some change events that interviewee informants talked were not qualified enough, which make it clear that choosing change cases before formal field work is initiated, is extremely important. A general view of the vital change events emerged during the pilot process. The typical change events in this study were deliberately selected19, and cover the entire history of the case organization. The change events selection process was iterative, and the author further conducted a simplified inquiry regarding the various levels of niche expansion which was to be examined in this research in order to cover major types of niche expansions. Discussion of this will be supplied in the next chapter.

Secondly, from the results of the pilot study, it became apparent that some interview

questions needed to be more concrete20, and also needed to be slightly shorter, and divided into several questions. Moreover, data validity was also considered in the pilot stage, due to some theory terms and translation issues, some informants were re-chosen randomly during the pilot study process. More informants were chosen randomly during the pilot stage to test this issue. The author also decided to send out the interview question list two days before the formal interviews. More details of which will follow in the interview section and in the operationalized design section of next chapter. Furthermore, problems can be addressed by selecting the change events before the formal field work commences, as the informants can choose the change events from the list which they experienced and are familiar with. And the informal chatting is very helpful during the observation period.

Thirdly, because informants have a busy schedule, and the interviews were excessively long during the pilot stage, the interviews had to be interrupted sometimes. This suggested that maybe interviews with key informants should be conducted twice. A relaxed non-work environment is important for encouraging interviewees to supply and recall more detailed information. Thus, appointments were booked with all possible interviewees in advance as soon as the pilot study finished. The time and places are supplied with flexible choices.

Fourthly, the author was aware that the single case is potentially vulnerable. Initially the author first intended to conduct comparison case studies, and tried to contact two other organizations during the pilot stage. Ultimately, it was not possible to study and make a direct replication. Firstly because although two targeted pair organizations agreed to be investigated, they are competitors in this industry. Organisational change is a strategic organizational decision, which makes managers unlikely to speak frankly about detailed company information. In addition, direct observation is limited. Part of their core facilities which contain the core technologies can not be visited, no matter if you are customers, suppliers, competitors or researchers. Conversations regarding how the core technological improved and products developed could not occur. Fully accessing the

files was also unlikely to be achieved and the available financial data was very limited. Especially since the records of change processes would be spread over all possible company¶s sources, it was impossible to collect systematic data to make full comparisons between organizations. Although partial information about change can be obtained from interviews, the construct validity is in doubt, preventing the aims of this study from being achieved.

The difficulties of gaining access to organizations have been fully recognized by previous organizational researchers, due to the issue of sensitive topics and the risk of disclosure. When researchers require large amounts of time to ask vague questions, they need to be flexible enough to cope with rebuffs (Miller, 1997). On account of the above, the author switched to the plan of single case embedded design.

Overall, the data from pilot study yielded a lot of information regarding the major change events. Part of the results are included in the analysis chapter. Eventually a satisfactory data collection procedure was developed for the formal field work. In next section of this chapter, in order to gain an impression to the research context, the industry, case organization and change events selection are discussed in a condensed form.