Data collection

the evolutionary change, thereby shaping the development of the organization and its practices.

The next section explains how this is captured and analyzed.

discussions that seemed promising. The study therefore aimed to discover the subjective view of the participants. During the study, the researcher conducted interviews with 46 interviewees.

Several interviewees were interviewed more than once to gain a deeper understanding of the issue at hand. As such, a total of 61 interviews were conducted, and these were used to build the case studies in the three individual papers. The table below lists the interviewees, by date, duration, position, and company.

Interview 1 Interview 2 Interview 3

Title Date Duration Date Duration Date Duration

Chief System Engineer - Air Greenland 18-04-12 59:42

Sales Manager - Air Greenland 13-03-13 43:40

Sales Director - Air Greenland 09-04-13 42:12

Chief Commercial Officer - Air Greenland 20-06-12 52:50 06-03-13 45:56 02-04-14 38:00 Chief Lead Mechanic/Board Member - Air Greenland 28-06-12 01:16:38

Network Revenue Controller - Air Greenland 23-08-14 01:10:15

Station Manager/Board Member - Air Greenland 04-05-12 42:58

Hotel Manager - Hotel Arctic 01-05-12 01:23:14

CEO - World of Greenland 30-04-12 01:06:22

Former CEO Air Greenland/Chairman AUL 26-03-12 01:25:51

Chief Financial Controller - Air Greenland 26-06-12 01:08:15

Chief Commercial Controller - Air Greenland 24-06-12 57:44 17-04-13 56:43 01-04-14 59:56 General Manager Charter - Air Greenland 20-04-12 47:42 13-03-13 40:47

Chief Operating Officer - Greenland Travel 29-05-12 01:18:42

Board Chairman - Air Greenland 28-03-12 01:28:07

e-Business manager - Air Greenland 05-03-13 37:00 07-01-14 01:27:44

CEO Arctic Umiaq Line 06-05-12 55:25

Chief Operating Officer - WOGAC 03-06-13 35:32

Vice Chairman - Air Greenland 22-06-12 50:09

Former Chief Mechanic - Air Greenland 06-05-12 01:17:29

Post Nominated Holder Operations - Air Greenland 17-04-12 01:03:19 01-04-14 35:42

IT-Manager - Air Greenland 02-04-14 01:07:06

Former Sales Manager - Air Greenland 20-03-13 40:02:00

Network Revenue Controller - Air Greenland 11-03-13 41:08:00

Sales Manager - Greenland Travel 04-04-12 57:23:00

HR Manager - Air Greenland 27-04-12 01:01:22

Division Manager Greenland Travel 04-03-13 01:07:00

Group Leader, Accounting - Air Greenland 14-03-13 41:35 03-04-14 01:32:20

CEO - Air Greenland 24-04-12 01:16:16

Deputy Minister - The Government of Greenland 17-11-12 01:04:21 Chief Financial Officer - Air Greenland 29-06-12 01:14:48 02-04-13 01:16:06

CEO - Greenlandic Airports 21-06-12 01:03:50

Former Station Manager - Air Greenland 21-03-12 01:20:11

CEO Vejle Rejser - Travel Agent 29-04-13 43:44

Former CFO - Air Greenland 22-05-12 01:14:11

Minister of Finance and Treasury - Grl. Government 03-07-12 01:13:14

CEO - Greenland Travel 22-05-12 01:21:53 22-03-13 45:57

Chief Technical Officer - Air Greenland 03-07-12 01:08:56

Sales Manager - Albatros Travel 21-03-13 36:33

Owner, CEO - Albatros Travel 21-03-13 47:56

CEO - World of Greenland Arctic Circle 31-05-12 49:11

Chief Accountant - Greenland Travel 24-05-12 56:32

Manager, Network Accounting - Air Greenland 06-07-13 56:12

Distribution Manager - Air Greenland 05-05-12 01:29:58 09-04-13 34:25 07-04-14 01:36:00 Network Revenue Manager - Air Greenland 22-06-12 01:05:09 05-03-13 01:00:42 Table 1 – List of interviewees and number of interviews.

Interviews were conducted based on a set of broad topics regarding management accounting change and organizational processes. The interview guide focused on how the interviewee saw their workday and the way they had experienced change processes undertaken in Air Greenland.

The objective was to understand how the interviewees perceived their workday in terms of rules, routines, habits, systems, processes, and practices. This enabled the researcher to see the contradictions that could potentially lead to conflict, thereby providing a better understanding of how management accounting changed and whether it was driven by the external context culture or individual actions. Individual interviews were conducted over a longer period of time and were directed toward the three papers that are part of this thesis.

Twenty-four of the interviews were conducted using a retrospective method. Cox and Hassard (2007) noted that this approach can be used in interviews to obtain more information from the individual interviews. They explained four approaches used in retrospective interviewing:

controlling the past, interpreting the past, co-opting the past, and representing the past. To interpret the past as well as possible, the researcher used the approach of controlling the past;

“this specific approach is somewhat positivistic and strives to insure validity and reliability as it attempts to maximize accurate recall of the historical event” (Cox & Hassard, 2007, p. 488).

This method was specifically used in the first paper to help establish and provide accurate

recalls of specific important occurrences in the development of management accounting in Air Greenland.

Commercial workdays were also used to gather data, because these are important for stakeholders and data pools. The daily work occurring in Air Greenland’s commercial division enabled the researcher to observe and collect data concerning everyday production and operations. Being a participant observer in one’s daily work was quite fruitful, but it was neither feasible nor desirable to take notes during work hours in front of fellow colleagues, because this could have inhibited them from talking freely. Consequently, observation notes on incidents and conversations were written up after work hours.

During the workday, observations were made across all sectors of the organizations and their subsidiaries. The researcher worked in multiple locations in both Denmark and Greenland and interacted with many different departments and employees. The focus was on the everyday activities and interactions in these specific settings. The purpose was to observe the environment in which operations were influenced by institutional views that reflected the organizational culture. Instead of solely relying on talk about occurrences, these observations gave the researcher direct access to concrete actions. To triangulate, the intranet and internal documents provided a large and valuable source of information to complement the findings from participant observations.

To analyze the practices in detail and understand how change occurs, this thesis uses a case study approach. The case study approach used in this thesis adopts Yin’s (2003, p. 13) definition: “…a method taking an empirical inquiry that ...benefits from existing development of a theoretical view that guide the data analysis and collection …handle the technically situation in which there will be many more interesting variables than the data shows.” The case study approach is also useful in management accounting studies. Ferreira and Merchant (1999) reviewed and evaluated the case study method from a management accounting and control perspective and argued that the main characteristic of case study research is that it is “not completely structured as this builds along with the observations in the field …where the researcher are in the organization having contact with the organizational participants …where the data includes relatively rich and descriptive sources of organizational context and practices”

(p. 4).

Flyvbjerg (2006) defined four case study approaches: extreme, maximum variation, critical, and paradigmatic. Given the uniqueness of the environment explored in this thesis, individual case studies can be considered extreme, which Flyvbjerg defines as a situation in which one

“…obtain[s] information on unusual cases, which can be especially problematic or especially good in a more closely defined sense,” (p.34) further noting that “atypical or extreme cases often reveal more information because they activate more actors and more basic mechanisms in the situation studied.” (p. 19). The case study is extreme because it is executed in an environment that is unique, considering the small number of citizens and the country’s large size, remoteness, and isolation. The extremeness is seen in the case study’s ability to analyze at the macro-, meso-, and microlevel and to engage a large number of key stakeholders at the production level as well as government ministers, thereby providing a detailed view of the change that is happening.

Flyvbjerg explained that the extreme approach places more emphasis on clarifying the deeper causes behind a given problem and its consequences as opposed to describing the symptoms of the problem and how frequently it occurs.

Greenland and Air Greenland provided several advantages owing to the uniqueness of the setting. Having one nation with only 55,000 people and a case company central to those, the case study approach could include actors from all levels of society in the empirical analysis. In addition, detailed descriptions of organizational procedures and practices helped in understanding the social, political, and economic factors that influence the development and, more specifically, the management accounting change. This provides better grounds for interpreting and understanding the different views of the participants in relation to their working experiences and changes in habits, rules, and routines.