Mapping network development of international new ventures with the use of company e-mails

International new ventures use e-mail frequently to communicate with globally dispersed contacts. In this paper we present and discuss a qualitative research method to map international network development based on company e-mails. Our approach also allows for combinations of inductive and deductive analysis and combines the possibility of content analysis and descriptive statistics with sensemaking through qualitative analysis of the narratives unfolding in the e-mail chains between the firm and its alters. We discuss these issues and examine to what extent and how structural and relational network variables and dimensions can be examined using e-mails and why this is relevant. In this discussion e-mails are also triangulated with and compared to other sources of data. The data used to exemplify our method are taken from an in-depth case study of a Dutch International New Venture. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2006