ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the results of a wide-ranging, complex and detailed survey of commercial experts on how one makes symbiotic contracts work. Numbers are not mere numbers, not vacuum packed; they exist in a context and empirical researchers must avoid crude equation of correlation with causation. The survey provides a reliable guide to the objectively reasonable expectations of commercial players in symbiotic contract environments. The strength of interviewing is flexibility and the ability to steer conversations. Good interviews allow the interviewee to do most of the talking. Extracting rich, refined, considered data from very senior participants would be difficult using an online survey. Commercial enterprises are generally unable or unwilling to provide population data to researchers. Evocatively, MB. Miles and AM. Huberman observe: “social processes have a logic and a coherence that random sampling can reduce to uninterpretable sawdust”.
