Research Method: Multiple Case Studies

One of the most cited definitions of a case study was provided by Yin (2009, p. 74) in which a case study is, ‘…an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident’.

In a simplest description, a case study may be regarded as both a process of strategic inquiry and the product of that inquiry (Stake 2005). The process of strategic inquiry in a case study can be translated in terms of: (a) a research method that will guide a researcher to investigate and analyse empirical data of the phenomenon understudied (Myers 2009), or (b) an approach to investigating social phenomenon through a systematic analysis of an individual case (Kumar 2005). The case may be a person, group, process, community, society and other unit of social life. Whilst, the product of that inquiry is the answer of

‘how’ and ‘why’ questions about contemporary events or phenomenon (Eisenhardt 1989) whereby these phenomenon are normally examined in its natural setting (Kelley, Peters &

O'Connor 2009). This is because the case study research usually involves the examination

Research Paradigm

of an inquiry explored through one or more cases within a bounded system (Creswell 2007).

Case studies are widely used in investigating contemporary social phenomena which emphasis on gaining contextual understanding of behavioural regularities of the subject understudied (Llewellyn & Northcott 2007). Further, the acceptance and popularity of the case study as a research method has gained it place amongst research community, specifically for optimising understanding by pursuing scholarly research questions (Stake 2005) and of the bridges from rich qualitative evidence to conventional deductive research (Eisenhardt & Graebner 2007). Due to this fact case study has been commonly employed by organisational studies researchers and social scientists, specifically in fields such as sociology, anthropology and industrial relations (Hartley 2004; Mohd Noor 2008).

From the context of business and management research that is commonly dominated by the positivist paradigm, advocates of qualitative management research faced difficulties to establish its legitimacy in using case studies as a new research approach, specifically in justifying issues around the representativeness of data and the generalizability of case study findings (Llewellyn & Northcott 2007; Siggelkow 2007). Nevertheless, in recent years, the viewpoint and contributions of the case study method in management research have received considerable interest from both classic scholars as well as authors from scholarly journals in the management field (such as Academy of Management Journal), specifically to make use of case studies as a strategic research method (Eisenhardt &

Graebner 2007). Myers (2009) mentions that the employment of case study research in the business and management field is used as empirical evidence to convince other researchers of the relevancy and applicability of a particular theory or proposition based on the phenomenon under study. Further, the use of the empirical evidence in a business and management study is derived from real people in real organisations to make a contribution to knowledge (Myers 2009).

Along with other qualitative inquiry methods, the case study method is also gaining acknowledgment within the small business and entrepreneurship scholars (Perren & Ram 2004). As suggested by Bygrave (2007), the application of more in-depth case studies is considered a way to better understand the entrepreneurial process in a firm. This is because the heart of the entrepreneurship process will be found in the descriptive background and

thus, the researcher may not able to comprehend the heart of the entrepreneurship process unless they observe it happening in the field. An illustration of this is the inductive case study carried out by Kistruck and Beamish (2010) in which they conducted rigorous analysis of ten case studies on social entrepreneurship in seven different countries within Africa and Latin America. This study has uncovered the importance of cognitive, network and cultural embeddedness in historically non-profit organisations.

From a qualitative research perspective, the application of case studies is used as an inductive investigative strategy (Merriam 2002) that investigates and explores a bounded system (a case) or multiple bounded systems (cases) over time. This process normally employs multiple, in-depth sources of information that eventually are able to produce richly descriptive reports about a case description as well as themes explored from the case under study (Creswell 2007). The case study method was chosen for this thesis due to several justifications, as listed below:

a) The case can usually get much closer to theoretical constructs and provide much more persuasive argument about causal forces than broad empirical research can (Siggelkow 2007). This thesis aims to uncover factors influencing sustainability of business amongst technology-based entrepreneurs in Malaysia and thus analysis has been conducted by applying the theoretical constructs that had been identified in the previous chapter. Indeed, the explorations of the proposed theoretical constructs were implemented via series of in-depth semi-structured interviews with selected entrepreneurs, academics and government officers in technology-based industries.

b) Case studies may be capable of supplying holism within one or several cases simultaneously with providing local theory (Stake 2005). This thesis focused on a small number of respondents (cases) with greater depth with selected theories as mentioned before.

c) Case studies may provide an opportunity for the intensive analysis of many specific details often overlooked by other methods (Kumar 2005). Through case study analysis the researcher was able to achieve greater depth and insight on ‘how’ and

‘why’ identified factors may influence the sustainability of business amongst Malaysian Bumiputera NTBSFs.