Step one: Initial/general themes extracted from the research activity model

The coding process of this research has started by a set of general themes that have been generated from the research activity model (the literature review and the preliminary exploratory study, see section ‎5.5.1). Generally, approaches of coding vary according to the theoretical adopted approach of analysis (Ritchie and Spencer 1994).

Miles and Huberman (1994, p. 57) put forward three approaches for coding:

- Creating a provisional “start list” of codes prior to fieldwork. That list comes from the conceptual framework, list of research questions, hypotheses, problem areas, and/or key variables which the researcher brings to the study.

Nevertheless, the start list is temporary. It is open to change and modification as the study proceeds. They argued that a start-list helps to orient the researcher to the conceptual purpose of the study.

- A more inductive researcher may not want to pre code any datum until he or she collect it, see how it functions or nests in its context, and determine how many varieties of are there. This is a “grounded” approach that is advocated by Glaser and Strauss (1967).

- Partway between a priori and inductive approaches, is that of creating a general accounting system of codes that is not content-specific but that points to the general domains, in which codes can be developed inductively (see also Checkland and Holwell (1998)).

However, for all the three approaches of coding, codes will change and develop continually during analysis. The final list of codes then needs to be described in detail (Miles and Huberman 1994).

171 The coding process of this study began with a set of general themes (Miles and Huberman 1994; Checkland and Holwell 1998) informed by the activity model of the pre fieldwork stage (see Section 5.5.1.). Figure 19 illustrates the position of the approach adopted in creating codes; the partway approach. Some codes were determined according to relevant categories emerged in the literature review (see Appendixes 6 and 7 for a full list of the general themes derived from the literature review) while other categories were created inductively from the empirical data. The following list of the initial themes emerged during the preliminary exploratory study (see Section 6.2.1):

1. Organizational factors: control and the need for a written rules and lack of standardizations.

2. Stakeholder’s abilities/skills: IT/IS knowledge of stakeholders, technological and managerial abilities of local tourism SME and training.

3. Social relations/Issues: Stakeholders conflict relations in the field.

4. Effective communication with tourists.

5. Other themes and factors: e.g. on line reservation, Public sector involvement, DMS brand, and Regular System evaluation.

Framework analysis Part way Grounded analysis (Prior coding) (General themes or domains) (Inductive coding)

Figure 19: the position of the study within coding approaches, based on Miles and Huberman (1994)

The position of this study

172 6.3.2.2.2. Step two: generating codes and categories

This step is concerned with the identification of codes taken from the data and the refinement of such codes into more abstract codes (categories). The coding process has started by assigning the codes, which were seen relevant to answering the research questions, to the texts and audios stored in the Nvivo project. The Nvivo was used to facilitate the coding process as informed by the seven thinking devices of Gee approach (2005, see Appendix 8). The codes (which are called free nodes in the Nvivo program) were the factors that influence the effectiveness of DMS from the perspectives of stakeholder groups (see Appendix 2 for examples of assigning codes to data).

Coding was an overlapping process of reading through the texts, listening to the recorded interviews, consulting the activity model outputs, importing new codes, and refining existing ones. Whilst reading the texts (interviews and documents), the annotation tool of Nvivo 8 was used to allow the researcher to add notes and ideas and relate these notes to the data in a text. Annotations are fast to prepare and fast to access (Bazeley and Richards 2000). They allow the addition of more than one note, or idea, to each point if needed. Appendix 2 gives an example of how annotation was used during this study.

Two types of codes have emerged during the analysis: early and abstract codes (Miles and Huberman 1994). The early or initial level of coding is mainly descriptive and requires little or no inference beyond the coded data. On the other hand, the second level of coding is a higher-inference and explanatory pattern coding that brings together less abstract and more descriptive code under it (Punch 2000). The higher level coding, which Miles and Huberman (1994) named ‘pattern codes’, is usually referred to by literature as categories. In the Nvivo 8 program, the initial or early level codes are named ‘free codes’, while the more abstract codes or categories are referred to as ‘tree nodes’. The following is a list of the early codes that have emerged in the early stage of analysis and which further refined when developed to categories:

1. Direct online booking.

2. Communications with tourists.

3. Conflict in the business environment.

173 4. Security: the control of the Touregypt Management Company on personal

e-mail and rules of communication.

5. Developers’ skills and technology availability.

6. Different views about the purpose of the Touregypt project.

7. DMS brand (URL).

8. Adequate Funding.

9. The IT skills and knowledge of large local companies.

10. How they knew Touregypt.

11. Information quality.

12. IT Infrastructure.

13. Intranet- updates.

14. Lacking IS and tourism management knowledge in SMTE.

15. Managerial support of the Tourism Ministry.

16. Online marketing strategy.

17. The influence of online tourists’ features.

18. Evaluation of DMS: evaluation from only tourists’ perspectives 19. Roles and regulations for DMS

20. Roles and regulations of tourism business.

21. Services quality.

22. Stable business environment

23. Standardized of prices and quality of services obtained.

24. System quality.

25. Technological support

26. The Ministry role in DMS development: nonprofit organization cannot sell destination.

27. The need to listen to stakeholders views on the system.

28. The support of the public sector.

29. Training

30. Trust between the Tourism Ministry and the local enterprises and the trust between the system and the tourists.

31. Type of markets: depending on T.O and mass tourism.

174 The abstract codes or categories are created when the researcher moves from the descriptive to more interpretive coding (Punch 2000). Nvivo 8 allows the creation of categories (under the name tree nodes as seen in Figure 42, Appendix 2). The tree nodes can be hierarchally-structured to include categories and any number of subcategories (see Figure 41, Appendix 2). In this study, the early codes (the free nodes) were put into categories (tree nodes) on the basis of themes, concepts, and topics with similar features (Neuman 2006). The complete tree of the research categories can be seen in Appendix 2, Figure 42. The following is a list of the tree categories which are further explained in Chapter 7:

1. Quality of DMS:

- Quality of DMS components; hardware, the website, system content and information, and other system components (e.g. security systems, and Intranet and Extranet).

- Communication and service quality.

2. Organizational influences:

- DMS management type: public and private sector involvement.

- Top management support.

- IT/IS knowledge and skills of stakeholders.

- Training.

- Adequate funding.

- Monitoring the system performance and keeping up-to-date with the rapidly changing world.

- The need for regular and coherent ways to evaluate DMS effectiveness.

3. Clear vision and Planned strategies:

- The need for a clear vision and planned strategies to support DMS implementation.

- Including the e-tourism strategies in the national framework of policies.

- Issues need to be considered when formulating DMS supportive strategies, e.g. considering stakeholders needs and having appropriate and detailed regulation.

4. Control and power.

5. Trust.

175 6. Achieving benefits.

- Achieving appropriate benefits for all stakeholders groups.

- Having common vision and accurate expectations on DMS benefits among stakeholders.

7. Environmental influences:

- Availability of IS and DMS professionals.

- Employing foreign DMS professionality and consultancy.

- Technological infrastructure.

- Cultural issues related to the effectiveness of DMS.

6.3.2.2.3. Memoing: (categories comments)

Memoing is the second fundamental operation after coding (the early and abstract codes). Yet, this does not imply that it succeeds coding, since memoing, as well as coding, takes place at the start of systematic analysis. Memos are ideas for making sense of data. They are restored for further work on them (Miles and Huberman 1994).

Memos can hold suggestions for deeper concepts than what coding has reached so far.

They also link between different concepts and thus can produce proposition (Punch 2000). Similarly, Maxwell (2005) mentioned that the ideas, or rather memos, that strike the analyst while coding not only capture the researcher’s analytical thinking about data, but also facilitate such thinking. Most of the memos developed during the analysis were imported into Nvivo. Nvivo allows the creation of memos⁹ and links them with their sources (Bazeley and Richards 2000), see Appendix 2. The memos of the categories were used to develop a more abstract concepts and propositions as follows.

9 The difference between the memos and the annotations in Nvivo is that annotation is attached to the text and can be seen in the same window of the interview transcript, while memos are hyperlinked in the transcript to a separate folder named memos.

176 6.3.2.2.4. Step three: concepts and propositions

All the memos under each category were reviewed, analyzed and organized in a word document (as it is more easily managed than in Nvivo when it comes to memo organization). Accordingly, the research findings under a set of related concepts and propositions were produced in relation to the research aims and questions (review Chapter 7 where concepts and its propositions are explained). Concepts are “abstract ideas generalized from empirical facts” (Taylor and Bogdan 1998, p. 141). Concepts sharpen abstracts of categories (Tesch 1990, p. 124). In this study, they included abstract versions of the descriptions of the categories and the memos related to these categories. However, propositions explain or theorize the relationships between concepts and are the foundations for theory building (Tesch 1990), (See Chapter 7 for a review of the concepts and propositions derived by this study). Taylor and Bogdan (1998) stated:

“It is through concepts and propositions that the researcher moves from description to interpretation and theory” (1998, p. 144).

The final result of this stage is thus a descriptive model which explains the data which the researcher has assembled (Becker and Geer 1982; cited in Tesch 1990, p. 83).

Based on the strategy adopted to generate a theory (see Figure 8) the findings of this study needed to be further investigated in light of the prior theories. This is in order to realize more validity for the research outcome. Here, the findings of this study are interpreted through a theoretical lens (which includes, mainly, DeLone and MacLean (1992, 2003) IS success theory and other IS and DMS prior theories). Hence, enfolding literature represented the final stage before the introduction of the theory based mode of DMS effectiveness evaluation (see Figure 8).

6.4. Chapter summary

This chapter outlines the process of collecting and analyzing the evidence of this study.

It describes the case of this study which is the Egyptian DMS experience (the Touregypt project). Also, both the primary and secondary stakeholders of the Touregypt project as well as the methods used to collect data from each of them have been identified. This chapter, then, details the actual process of data collection

177 starting by discussing the activity model of the pre-field word stage (the preliminary literature review and the exploratory study). This is followed by a discussion on the procedures and the overlapping nature of the fieldwork process, see Figure 11. Data collection techniques included structured and semi-structured interviews, observation, document survey, and forum and website analysis. Subsequently, the process of the data analysis has been discussed with the aim of justifying the use of Meso discourse analysis approach, see Figure 16. The Meso analysis of this study has combined both Gee approach (2005) of discourse analysis and Miles and Huberman approach (1994), see section 6.3.1. Further, the process of doing the analysis has been presented and justified. The codes of the research have emerged from the data with a few prior ideas.

The first step of the process was a set of general themes emerged from the research activity model (see Section ‎6.3.2.2.1). This is followed by the identification of the early and abstract codes inductively and then drawing the final concepts and propositions as further explained in the next chapter.

178