Empirical Results
Internationalizing the Small and Medium Sized Firm – four cases
This chapter contains the description of the four case companies. The reader will be given a brief introduction to the company before the internationalization process is described in detail. The text has been edited in order for the cases to be easily comparable when reading the different texts, giving the reader a better opportunity to draw own conclusions about the cases. In order to increase the understanding for readers not familiar with the topic the first story has been made somewhat more extensive giving more back-ground information than the others. The reason that not all of them are made more extensive is that the empirical chapter would then have become too long. The choice to extend the case of Avanza, and not any of the others, was natural, due to one of the author’s back-ground in the company. This made it easier to obtain a more detailed version of the story.
The empirical result presented is solely the interviewed persons’ perceptions of what happened. The authors have not to any greater extent tried to check the reliability in their answers. The primary reason is that the authors in accordance with Bengtsson (1994) argue that perceptions and actions are flipsides of the same coin. People act on their perceptions, i.e. actions and perceptions take place simultaneously. Another reason is that it to a large extent would be impossible to obtain this kind of information through any other sources than interviews and furthermore that it would require more time spent on research than within the scope of this thesis.
