Sample
Since many companies are international according to our definition we had no problems finding companies suitable for our study. We wanted to have international manufacturing companies situated within the region of Skane. Other factors in consideration were the size of the company, different industries and age and in different stages of their internationalisation process.
We chose to use a non-probability sampling since with probability sampling the chance, or probability, of each case being selected from the population is known and is usually equal for all cases. This means that we should have access to a complete list of all the cases in the population, from which the sample would be drawn. It is not possible, for us, to have a list of all international manufacturing companies within the region of Skane. With non-probability sampling the probability of each case being selected from the total population is not known. By using a purposive sampling we were able to select cases that would best help us to answer our research questions.
Our aim was to do in-depth interviews at eight companies, where four companies would have a long international history and four companies would be in a relatively early stage of the internationalisation process. In order to find suitable companies many companies' homepages were visited to find out about different factors as age, size and degree of internationalisation. Our aim was to find companies with different internationalisation history and a mixture of small and large companies. Of interest was also to have both old and new founded companies. To find companies willing to participate in our study we sent out e-mails. We sent e-mails to 30 companies in hope to get five to ten positive respondents. Out of the chosen population 17 companies responded and five of these were interested in letting us interview them. Another four companies were willing to participate but not within our time frame.