ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a range of ways in which qualitative methods may be used to study and theorize about strategy processes, that is, to examine the how questions of strategic management that deal with phenomena such as decision making, learning, strategizing, planning, innovating, and changing (Van de Ven, 1992). Qualitative data have particular strengths for understanding processes because of their capacity to capture temporally evolving phenomena in rich detail, something that is hard to do with methodologies based on quantitative surveys or archival databases that are coarse-grained and tend to “skim the surface of processes rather than plunging into them directly” (Langley, 1999: 705).
