ABSTRACT
In this chapter I introduce three further important research strategies that are often used in management studies: the case study, ethnography and action research. They differ from the experiment and survey in that they all focus on the intensive study of one, or a few, cases in natural settings. The researcher's experience of implementing these strategies will be very different from that of the laboratory experimenter or the survey researcher. Those approaches do not require and may well forbid any close contact between the investigator and those being studied. Adoption of any one of the strategies reviewed in this chapter, however, will usually bring the researcher and the researched into immediate contact, with all the problems and opportunities that such meetings bring.
