The Research Situations, Research Methodology and Framework of Analysis of the Case Studies

Abstract

The author was enabled to conduct the research for this book through the award of a personal research grant by the Social Science Research Council. This meant that she had one year in which to carry out the necessary fieldwork. The pilot project conducted with Professor Hedberg of the University of Gothenburg had demonstrated that the issue of “values” in relation to the design of computer systems was worth pursuing in more depth, and her first requirement was to identify a number of organizations which were large users of computer systems and which would be interested in collaborating in the research. In view of the restricted research coverage that can be carried out by a lone research worker, it seemed important to choose organizations which fell into two broad groups so as to enable research comparisons to be made. Within each group there should be some similarity in the principal independent variable, namely values.