Cabbalistic cases: demystifying generalizability

Case study research is concerned with in-depth and within context knowledge which is generated empirically. As such it is well suited to address complex marketing problems thus advancing theory in the discipline. In spite of these benefits, case studies are rarely published in marketing journals thus depriving the discipline of rich insights and opportunities to build new theory. This relatively poor showing of case study research may be attributable to a perceived lack of rigour with one particular criticism being that case study findings are not generalizable. This paper sets out to investigate the generalizability ‘problem’ in case study research. It finds that strategic case selection and specificity in the bounding of cases enable the findings of a study to be extended to similar contexts and generalized to theory.