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the organisation and the relationships that it has with others (Kayrooz & Trevitt, 2005). For
example, in his research on alliances, Doz (1996) recruited participants that had been
directly involved in the partnership. Hamel (1991) also interviewed those that were based
on either side of the alliance.
2) Potential participants currently in these positions were excluded from the
research if they had been in the organisation for a period of less than three months. This
exclusion criterion was established as anyone that had not been involved in the organisation
for a substantial period would not have been able to adequately contribute to the topic of
inter-partner research.
3) As a backup plan, the offer was extended to past employees of these
organisations, if those in the current role did not meet the previous criteria. If past
employees were sought, they were required to have been involved within the organisation
in the last three years. Any time spent previous to this period would have called into
question the potential ability for participants to accurately recall information. However, all
participants interviewed were currently employed by the organisation at the time they were
interviewed as well as having been in that organisation for longer than the required three
months. Therefore, there was no need to interview past employees of the organisation.
It should be noted that members of the Board were not initially considered. The
researcher and academic supervisors presumed that the Board were too distant in relation to
the day-to-day running of the organisation. Therefore, the selected employees were in a
better position to comment on the research topic. However, while conducting interviews
with the initial selected participants one Board member’s name from each organisation was
mentioned by a majority of the participants on a regular basis. This led the researcher to
believe that the Board played a bigger role in the inter-partner relationship than first
envisaged. Therefore, the selected Board members, whose names were mentioned in the
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