Doing Qualitative Case Study Research in Business Management

Qualitative research has experienced an upsurge in business management fields of inquiry in the recent past. A methodology is selection, justification and sequential arranging of activities, procedures and tasks in a research project. Research methodology can no longer be confined to a set of universally applicable rules, conventions and traditions. A research paradigm is a set of propositions that explains how the world is perceived. There are three basic paradigms: positivist, interpretive and critical. Positivists believe that research should be objective and value-free, therefore, mainly they depend on quantitative analysis while paradigms other than positivism often guide qualitative research. Interpretivists seek understanding of the world in multiple realities and often these subjective meanings are negotiated socially and historically while critical theorists aim to criticize social reality, emancipate, empower and liberate people, and propose solutions to social problems. Qualitative ‘approaches to research', ‘strategies of inquiry' and ‘varieties of methodologies' classified into five ‘types' or ‘traditions' namely; biography, phenomenology, grounded theory, ethnography and case study. The major criticism made of qualitative methods is that they are impressionistic and non-verifiable, post-positivists who reject this charge claiming that qualitative data is auditable and therefore dependable. Further, quantitative research is considered hard-nosed, data-driven, outcome-oriented, and truly scientific, however, even qualitative research can be hard-nosed, data-driven, outcome-oriented, and truly scientific. The less structured qualitative methodologies reject many of the positivists' constructions over what constitutes rigour, favouring instead the flexibility, creativity and otherwise inaccessible insights afforded by alternative routes of inquiry that embrace storytelling, recollection, and dialogue