Contextualization

Internal Contextualization

Internal contextualization highlights the holistic features of case study research, addressing the interrelationships between different aspects of the case and analyzing the significance of specific events, narratives, and processes in relation to this [Page 232]wider configuration. Thus a case study of a workplace may locate the day-to-day survival strategies of workers in relation to specific management policy repertoires and their implementation by varied technical and supervisory specialists, and in relation to tensions and alliances between different categories of workers with distinct occupational, gender, or generational experiences. This is an agenda pursued in exemplary fashion by Jean-Pierre Durand and Nicolas Hatzfeld in their study of life on the line at Peugeot.

This concern for internal contextualization underwrites the importance of both ethnography and mixed methods of research in the conduct of case studies. Ethnographic research is characterized by attention to the activities of participants in real-life settings and is thus marked by the explicit contextualization of activity and interaction within its immediate social context. Meanwhile a combination of methods, such as participant observation, key informant interviews, surveys, and documentary research, affords multiple bearings on the configuration of social processes and social relations under investigation. Case studies vary in the mixtures of methods they utilize, and the scope of each study is also influenced by its analytical focus and the research resources available. Nevertheless, a good case study research design must utilize a set of research methods that will be able to satisfy this key requirement of effective internal contextualization.

In pursuing such internal contextualization, a central concern of case study research is for the researcher(s) to be open-minded in exploring the salience of different aspects of the social organization of their case for understanding and explaining focal features of that case. Another imperative is to recognize that this internal contextualization is necessarily selective rather than exhaustive, even in the most detailed of case studies. This relationship between open-mindedness and selectivity in pursuing the holistic and contextualizing agenda of case study research presents a persistent challenge, and different traditions of case study research respond to this challenge in different ways. Thus internal contextualization may be pursued differently by postpositivists, interpretative sociologists, critical realists, or postmodernists.

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