Persuasion with case studies

By Nicolaj Siggelkow. 2007

4,396 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/539c062b9872bc808de9023bb88ab7b685f70e75

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Citations in the corpus

Encouraging knowledge sharing among employees: How job design matters (2009, background): “This implies that our research design controls for a number of broad contextual factors known to influence intraorganizational knowledge shar- ing (cf. Siggelkow, 2007).”
Studying innovation ecosystems using ecology theory (2016, background): “21 A single case reduces the possibility of generalisation (Lee, 1989), but we have used it to highlight some gaps in this new area of the literature and to begin to fill them (Siggelkow, 2007).”
International entrepreneurship, born globals and the theory of effectuation (2011, background): “As the aim is to study a particular type of organization this company was selected, as is of less importance to have many cases, rather the focus here is on gaining in depth information of one case ( Siggelkow, 2007”
A Qualitative Approach to Evidence–Based Entrepreneurship: Theoretical Considerations and an Example Involving Business Clusters (2014, background): “Case study research can be increasingly valuable to a discipline, if the cases involved motivate an interesting research question, if they inspire new ideas, and if they illustrate concrete examples of constructs (Siggelkow, 2007).”
Decision making and uncertainty: The role of heuristics and experience in assessing a politically hazardous environment (2015, methodology): “This is important for establishing foundational causal links for future research on the shifts from individual to group heuristics and from group to firm capabilities (Siggelkow, 2007).”
Lean principles, learning, and knowledge work: Evidence from a software services provider (2011, methodology): “After we selected the site and gained access, we crafted our protocol, entered the field, analyzed the data, and enfolded the literature until closure was reached (see Table 3 for a summary of our approach).”
Strategic agility-driven business model renewal: the case of an SME (2017, background): “As case studies are often used to make a conceptual contribution, this study cites a considerable number of quotes from the original data (see Tables I-III) to introduce transparency into the descriptions and to provide valuable illustrations (Siggelkow, 2007).”
Servitization: Disentangling the Impact of Service Business Model Innovation on Manufacturing Firm Performance (2013, neutral): “It is interesting to note that complementarity will be contingent upon or ‘contextual’ to (Porter and Siggelkow, 2008) the business model and managerial practices that help enact complementary feedback from services to products (e.g. systems that transform service-field information into…”
Effectuation, Causation, and Bricolage: A Behavioral Comparison of Emerging Theories in Entrepreneurship Research (2012, methodology): “The richness and detail in data were the primary reason for selecting the cases, and this ultimately outweighed the benefit of using a random sample (Santos & Eisenhardt, 2009; Siggelkow, 2007).”
Value Creation and Business Models: Refocusing the Intellectual Capital Debate (2013, background): “…distinct literatures, synthesising the key elements of relevance to the central research issue – the future of 2 Case studies can also be used to motivate a research question and generate theory (inspiration) (Siggelkow, 2007). business reporting and the implications for the IC research agenda.”
Forging an Identity: An Insider-outsider Study of Processes Involved in the Formation of Organizational Identity (2010, background): “Thus it was an ideal case for more clearly discerning key processes and an interesting case to provoke additional theorizing (see Siggelkow, 2007).”
Quadruple helix as a network of relationships: creating value within a Swedish regional innovation system (2019, methodology): “A case study has the potential to generate new insights that can refine and further develop current theoretical knowledge (Eisenhardt and Graebner 2007; Siggelkow 2007).”