El estudio de casos como metodología de investigación científica en dirección y economía de la empresa : una aplicación a la internacionalización

Management, as a social science, and Strategic Management, as a specific scientific discipline of this science, require research methodologies that can deal with all of the complexities of the business phenomena to be analysed. Certain circumstances call for methodologies that can combine different types of information: qualitative and quantitative, subjective and objective, internal and external to the phenomenon under study. In recent years, case studies have become one of the "non-traditional" scientific research methodologies being used with increasing frequency in the area of Management. However, the inherent weaknesses in case studies have apparently been a strong enough argument for this methodology to be called into question by the scientific community for a long time. The aim of this paper is to present a methodological design for using case studies in scientific research and to assert the validity thereof under the right conditions, when the right design is used and when the methodology is strictly applied. The proposed methodological design is represented and specified in its different stages and has been applied with satisfactory results in a multiple case study on internationalisation, which we will use here to illustrate our proposal. -- case studies ; research methodology ; business economics ; strategic management internationalisation