SAMPLING

We took most of our samples from multinational and international companies, headquartered in many different countries . The results were shared with the samples surveyed and we learned much from their comments on our questions. These samples drawn from the variety of organizations reveal functionally equivalent sets, since nearly all these organizations were pursuing similar ends. Gender, age, education, and occupation differences are being case matched, to achieve similar distributions in each subset.

Finally it should be noted that our whole approach was not based on attempting to obtain an orthogonal data set as typified in classical market research. In the latter type of study, a sample is selected ( targeted ) with the minimum number of cases to obtain full coverage of each attribute (country, age, gender, etc.). This full concept method is not appropriate to our quest because of practical difficulties. How, for example, would we find a young, female , senior Arab leader working in a Gulf Country? We have adopted the approach of collecting a large data set with wide internal variety and then performing a reflective analysis that we can describe as knowledge discovery by induction.

Research instruments have been developed as experimental instruments to discover how the respondents reacted to dilemmas. The dilemma methodology imagines a conflict between two principles, e.g., respect for law versus loyalty among friends . In perhaps 95 percent of all cases, the claims of law and those of friendship coincide, but by imagining a case where these clash (for example, where the terms of a business contract have become idiosyncratic due a change in market conditions), we can discover whether respondents reject reconciliation, or strive to reconcile , or simply abandon their value systems.