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INTRODUCTION
The case study has an established place in qualitative international business (IB) research.1 A recent review of articles published in four core IB journals over a 10-year period found case studies to be the most popular qualitative research strategy (Piekkari, Welch, & Paavilainen, 2009). This prevalence of the case study is not surprising, given its potential to generate novel and groundbreaking theoretical insights. Yet our contention in this paper is that the theorising potential of case studies has not been fully realised in the field of IB. We attribute this to the entrenched belief that case research is suited only to inductive theory-building. In this paper, we seek to challenge this belief by offering alternatives to inductive theorising and broadening the possibilities in IB for theorising from case studies. In order to do so, we consider how the case study generates causal explanations and how it incorporates context - two features of the case study that are often regarded as being incompatible. By challenging common preconceptions about case studies, we see our audience as comprising not just qualitative researchers, but also the wider community of scholars who are often called upon to evaluate the theoretical contribution of case research.
Our paper contributes to the debate over theorising in IB research, which recognises that alongside the perennial epistemological dilemma faced by social scientists - namely, how to develop robust explanations about phenomena in the social world - IB scholars have to contend with the question of how to ensure that their theories are sensitive to diverse national contexts. Consequently, we would argue that IB is a highly appropriate field in which to discuss the development of rigorous, yet context-sensitive, theory. There is growing concern that, in the pursuit of robust explanations, contextualisation has suffered. Greater use of qualitative research has been suggested as a remedy for this imbalance, thus placing approaches such as the case study squarely on the agenda for IB theory. Yet our contention in this paper is that, in IB research, the dominant view of the case study as a tool solely for inductive theory-building has restricted its theorising potential, both in terms of generating causal explanations and of contextualising theory.
In this paper, we challenge this dominant view by constructing...