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In this article I describe and compare a number of alternative generic strategies for the analysis of process data. looking at the consequences of these strategies for emerging theories. I evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the strategies in terms of their capacity to generate theory that is accurate, parsimonious. general, and useful and suggest that method and theory are inextricably intertwined, that multiple strategies are often advisable. and that no analysis strategy will produce theory without an uncodifiable creative leap, however small. Finally, I argue that there is room in the organizational research literature for more openness within the academic community toward a variety of forms of coupling between theory and data.
As change sweeps through industries, organizations, and workgroups, we are seeing a surge of interest among organizational researchers in process theory and dynamic phenomena, such as organizational learning (Cohen & Sproull, 1991), competitive interaction (Illnitch, D'Aveni, & Lewin, 1996), innovation and change (Van de Ven & Huber, 1990), and strategic evolution (Barnett & Burgelman, 1996). One group of researchers has chosen to address these dynamics by formulating a priori process theories and testing them using coarse-grained longitudinal time series and event-history methods. Another camp has chosen rather to plunge itself deeply into the processes themselves, collecting finegrained qualitative data-often, but not always, in real time-and attempting to extract theory from the ground up (Bower, 1997; Pettigrew, 1992; Van de Ven, 1992). The philosophy of this camp is that to truly understand how and why events play out over time, we must examine them directly (Mintzberg, 1979).
I identify myself as a member of the second camp, but in no way think the task we have set ourselves is easy. Process data are messy. Making sense of them is a constant challenge. In this article I examine a number of different strategies for approaching this task. My objective is not to advocate one strategy or another, or even to propose radically new strategies (although I do draw on my own research with colleagues in delineating some of them), but, rather, to consider the strengths and weaknesses of different modes of analysis of process data in terms of their capacity to generate theory that is accurate, parsimonious, general, and useful (Weick, 1979). I...