Combining Case Study Designs for Theory Building

Lakshmi Balachandran Nair is Assistant Professor in the Department of Business and Management at LUISS Guido Carli University, Italy. Her research interests include qualitative methodology, business ethics, and organization studies. She has published journal articles, case studies, book chapters, and a book on these topics. For her work, she has received several awards and grants including the BAM Best Full Paper Award (2018) and the ECRM Teaching Research Methods Excellence Award (2019). Michael Gibbert is Professor of Sustainable Consumption at The University of Lugano, Switzerland. He has more than twenty years of experience in teaching qualitative methods and has received numerous prizes at renowned conferences. Bareerah Hafeez Hoorani is Assistant Professor of Qualitative Empirical Methods at Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University, the Netherlands. Her research focuses on qualitative research methods and organizational identity. She has been recipient of numerous best paper awards at the British Academy of Management Conferences.

• 1. Introduction to case study research; 2. Building blocks of case study research; 3. Of talking pigs and black swans: single holistic case study design; 4. Do it again: the evidentiary basis of case studies is plural; 5. The natural experiment, aka the single embedded design; 6. Do it again (and again): multiple embedded case study design; 7. Sequencing case study designs: inductive-deductive; 8. More on sequencing case study designs: deductive-inductive; 9. A parting (optimistic) note.