The Interviews
To test our hypotheses we decided to conduct a case study, since a survey using questionnaires would not have provided us with deep enough information. Instead, we chose to do face-to face in-depth interviews. This gave us the possibility to ask resulting questions and to explain our questions when needed. The e-mails we sent out were addressed to the market managers at the companies. We asked for one and a half hour interviews and this turned out to be a good estimation. This was a reasonable request of time both to fit the companies' and our schedules. At Alfa Laval we met with the Market Manager, Martin Hermansson. At Perstorp AB we first met with Cecilia Hakansson, Informer, and then with Lars Eric Johansson, Vice President for Penta. Robert Nilsson, Market and Technical Manager, provided us with answers about Backer AB. Peter Ahlberg, one of the owners, informed us about Kron International and the owner of Furninova, Benny Nilsson, welcomed us at Furninova. All the visits started with a brief presentation of the companies. Then the interviewed persons spoke freely about the companies' internationalisation process. Then we asked our 20 main questions which led to resulting questions. This was then followed by a discussion. Our interview was a mixture of a semi-structured and an unstructured interview. In semi-structured interviews the researcher will have a list of themes and questions to be covered, although these may vary from interview to interview. Unstructured interview are informal and are used to explore a general area in-depth, also referred to as in-depth interviews (Saunders, Lewis & Thornhill, 2003). We have already spoken about the advantages of interviewing, the disadvantages could be that the interviewer, in this case us, may influence the interviewee to respond in a certain way. A problem could be prestige bias when the interviewee would respond in a way to make him look better. Since we did not ask any 'sensitive' questions this is probably not a big problem in our study.
Over all, we think that we received quite good and relevant answers from the interviewed companies. We had expected the different companies to be more engaged in networks, both national and international, but we were provided with quite thin and short answers regarding this subject although we tried to ask and explain these questions in various ways.