This article discusses the research strategy of theory building from cases, particularly multiple cases. Such a strategy involves using one or more cases to create theoretical constructs, propositions, and/or midrange theory from case-based, empirical evidence. Replication logic means that each case serves as a distinct experiment that stands on its own merits as an analytic unit. The frequent use of case studies as a research strategy has given rise to some challenges that can be mitigated by the use of very precise wording and thoughtful research design.

Theory Building From Cases: Opportunities And Challenges

We will review some of the major results in random graphs and some of the more challenging open problems. We will cover algorithmic and structural questions. We will touch on newer models, including those related to the WWW.

Random graphs

This article presents some helpful suggestions on how researchers can write an interesting and convincing paper based on case-based research. A single case study, unless the subject is extremely interesting, will be hard to make interesting enough to hold readers' attention. Case-based research is often criticized for having a biased sample of cases. The main object of case studies should be to provoke thought and new ideas, rather than to poke holes in existing theories. Theories are only simplifications of a much more complex reality.

Persuasion with case studies

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The Theory of Industrial Organization

Exploration and exploitation have emerged as the twin concepts underpinning organizational adaptation research, yet some central issues related to them remain ambiguous. We address four related que...

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The interplay between exploration and exploitation

We examine how and why elements of organizational design depend on one another. An agent-based simulation allows us to model three design elements and two contextual variables that have rarely been analyzed jointly: a vertical hierarchy that reviews proposals from subordinates, an incentive system that rewards subordinates for departmental or firm-wide performance, the decomposition of an organization's many decisions into departments, the underlying pattern of interactions among decisions, and limits on the ability of managers to process information. Interdependencies arise among these features because of a basic, general tension. To be successful, an organization must broadly search for good sets of decisions, but it must also stabilize around good decisions once discovered. An effective organization balances search and stability. We identify sets of design elements that encourage broad search and others that promote stability. The adoption of elements that encourage broad search typically raises the marginal benefit of other elements that provide offsetting stability. Hence, the need to balance search and stability generates interdependencies among the design elements. We pay special attention to interdependencies that involve the vertical hierarchy. Our findings confirm many aspects of conventional wisdom about vertical hierarchies, but challenge or put boundary conditions on others. We place limits, for instance, on the received wisdom that firm-wide incentives and capable subordinates make top-level oversight less valuable. We also identify circumstances in which vertical hierarchies can lead to inferior long-term performance.

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Balancing Search and Stability: Interdependencies Among Elements of Organizational Design

The goal of every author is to write a paper that readers (and reviewers) find convincing. Since writers of papers based on case research do not have recourse to the canonical statement “results are significant at p 0.05” that helps assuage readers’ skepticism of empirical papers, researchers using case research often feel they are fighting an uphill battle to persuade their readers. In this short essay, I provide some thoughts guided by my experience of reading, reviewing, and writing papers based on case-based research over the last decade. These are clearly only the views of this particular writer and thus should be taken with a considerable grain of salt. I am seeking here more to provoke thought than to provide answers. What makes a case study persuasive? The first big obstacle that many writers feel they face is the charge of having too small a sample. Yet, imagine the following scenario, adapted from Ramachandran (1998): You cart a pig into my living room and tell me that it can talk. I say, “Oh really? Show me.” You snap with your fingers and the pig starts talking. I say, “Wow, you should write a paper about this.” You write up your case report and send it to a journal. What will the reviewers say? Will the reviewers respond with “Interesting, but that’s just one pig. Show me a few more and then I might believe you”? I think we would agree that that would be a silly response. A single case can be a very powerful example. Perhaps not surprisingly, the management field is not alone in its debate about the value of smallversus large-sample research. In neurology, where a lot of knowledge has been gleaned from case studies of individual patients with particular brain injuries (lesions), a similar debate is underway. Ramachandran, a prominent neurologist, uses the example above to make his case for case research. So should we now rejoice and simply cite Ramachandran to motivate and justify our case-based research? Well, we had better not forget that the above scenario involved a talking pig. That was quite a deal. Thus, my first main point is that if you want to write a case study that derives its excitement and justification through little more than the description of a particular phenomenon, make sure you have a talking pig. If not, a purely descriptive study will be a hard sell. The second charge that case-based researchers often feel obliged to defend themselves against is that of nonrepresentativeness. “You have a biased sample,” reviewers might say. Let us again have a quick look at the field of neurology. One of the most celebrated case studies in that field is of a man named Phineas Gage. Living in the second half of the 19th century, Gage was the foreman of a construction crew preparing the bed for a new railroad line. Part of his job was to fill holes, first with gunpowder and then with sand, which was then packed in with a large tamping iron. Unfortunately, at one hole Gage forgot the sand, created a spark with his tamping iron, and ignited the charge. The tamping iron, weighing thirteen and a half pounds, shot through his head, landing 30 yards behind him. Remarkably, Gage survived and continued to live for 12 more years, despite the large hole in his head and major destruction to his brain’s frontal lobes. However, both psychologically and behaviorally, he was a changed man. For example, while he had previously been considered a smart man who energetically executed his plans, he now was capricious and vacillating, devising many plans but not following through with any of them. Similarly, whereas before he had been described as having a temperate personality, he was now impatient and profane, particularly when advice given to him conflicted with his desires. These psychological and behavioral changes led observers to draw inferences about what functions might be performed by the frontal lobes.

http://portaldeperiodicos.unisul.br/index.php/EeN/article/download/37/30

To create a competitive advantage, firms need to find activity configurations that are not only internally consistent, but also appropriate given the firm's current environment. This challenge is particularly acute after firms have experienced an environmental change that has shifted the existing competitive landscape and created new, high-performing sets of activity choices. How should firms organize to explore and search such an altered performance landscape? While it has been noted that adaptive entities need to maintain a balance of exploration and exploitation, little is known about how different organizational structures moderate this balance. With the help of an agentbased simulation model, we study the value of three different organizational structures: a centralized organization, in which decisions are made only at the level of the firm as a whole; a decentralized organization, in which decisions are made independently in two divisions; and a temporarily decentralized firm, which starts out with a decentralized structure and later reintegrates.We find that if interactions among a firm's activities are pervasive, neither the centralized nor the permanently decentralized organizational structure leads to high performance. In this case, temporary decentralization--an organizational structure that has not found much attention in the literature--yields the highest long-term performance. This organizational structure allows the firm both to avoid low-performing activity configurations and to eventually coordinate across its divisions. Thus, even if the decision problem a .rm faces is not fully decomposable, a temporary bifurcation can lead to a higher long-term performance outcome. Initial decentralized exploration is, however, costly in the short run, as compared to centralized exploration. As a result, a tradeoff exists between the short-term costs of decentralized exploration and the longterm benefits of reaching higher performance. As interactions across and within divisions increase, the optimal length of decentralized exploration tends to grow.Paralleling our first result, we further show that even if a decision problem is decomposable, that is, can be perfectly modularized, it can be beneficial to create a temporary decision allocation that creates "unnecessary" interdependencies across the subsystems. This benefit arises in particular when the modules are complex by themselves. In both cases, an initial phase of exploration, enabled by an appropriate organizational structure, followed by refinement and coordination, enabled by a different structure, leads to high performance. To illustrate our general model, we focus on incumbent firms' responses to the Internet and discuss implications for the product design process.

Temporarily Divide to Conquer: Centralized, Decentralized, and Reintegrated Organizational Approaches to Exploration and Adaptation

This paper uses a longitudinal case study of the mutual fund provider, The Vanguard Group, to understand the developmental processes that lead to organizational configurations and fit. A new method for determining an organization’s core elements is developed, and four processes are identified that describe the creation and subsequent elaboration of these core elements: thickening (reinforcement of an existing core element by new elaborating elements), patching (creation of a new core element and its reinforcement by new elaborating elements), coasting (no further elaboration of a new core element in a given period), and trimming (deletion of a core element and its elaborating elements). The four processes are used to describe organizations’ development paths toward configurations and their transitions between configurations, including two new ideal types, termed thin-to-thick and patch-by-patch, as well as two known paths between configurations, the punctuated equilibrium path and reorientation through linear progression.•

Nicolaj Siggelkow

Papers

Persuasion with case studies

Balancing Search and Stability: Interdependencies Among Elements of Organizational Design

Persuasion with case studies

Temporarily Divide to Conquer: Centralized, Decentralized, and Reintegrated Organizational Approaches to Exploration and Adaptation

Evolution toward Fit