Private-Equity-Firms by Burkhardt Kirsten;

Author:Burkhardt, Kirsten; [Burkhardt, Kirsten]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2018-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

3.2.2.2. Selection process and presentation of the cases and fields of study

This section is devoted to presenting the selection process of the cases and fields of study, before describing them.

The selection process of the cases and fields of study

The selection of cases is a theoretical and intentional question, guided by the theoretical concept [SCA 90, p. 273; DAV 05]. The latter includes either the variables relevant to the companies forming the alliance (for example the publicly listed or otherwise status of the company), or the variables relevant to the PEFs, given that we are interested in the role of PEFs in the formation of alliances for their portfolio companies. This means, for example, variables such as their specialization, whether they are established PEFs on the market or young and building their reputation, the number of portfolio companies that they support, whether they take majority or minority stakes, or again, if they advertise their relationship building activities. A “case”, however, represents the formation of an alliance between at least two companies in the presence of a PEF. It is therefore necessary, in our study, to distinguish the “field” from the “case” itself. The chosen PEFs thus constitute the fields of study, and the examples of alliances (for their portfolio companies) that they provide us with, the cases.

Practically, this means that the “fields” for the case studies, that is, the PEFs, are chosen in such a way that the independent variables concerning the PEF’s role in the formation of alliances that stem from our research hypotheses are represented. Ideally, the fields are chosen in such a way as to contrast with each other with respect to one or more of the criteria linked with the research variables, while being comparable apart from these criteria. This then allows us to ensure that the observed results are not distorted by the presence of other variables which may have an impact upon the phenomenon to be studied. Thus, all the criteria relating to PEFs arising from our hypotheses are represented, with their various modalities. This means that, for example for the criterion of “taking majority stakes”, we have chosen at least one PEF which takes majority stakes and at least one PEF which takes minority stakes. Moreover, each criterion is represented twice, in order to allow literal replication. Again, with regard to the variable “taking majority stakes”, this implies that we need two examples of alliances where the PEF that supports the enterprises takes majority stakes.

As we will explain, we have chosen four PEFs among those which we studied, and for each of them two cases of the formation of alliances, in order to be able to carry out a literal replication, not only across the study in general but also for each field. This resulted overall in eight case studies. The actual number of case studies is not very important (contrary to statistical and econometric studies where the sample size of the study is decisive for its significance), even if, in general, the more cases for replication, the greater the degree of certainty for the results observed.

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