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culmination of this first generation of interpretive case studies arrived in the Chicago school of sociology, where anthropology’s field study method was practiced on contemporary society (Platt, 1992; van Maanen, 1988). Following the end of the Second World War, the social sciences began to favour positivism and quantitative methods, and thus case study methodology fell out of favour: ‘During this period differing methodologies led to a distinction within the social sciences between two cultures: positivistic and anti-positivistic’ (Johansson, 2003, p. 6). In this context, interpretive qualitative case studies were criticised as being non-scientific. By the late 1960s, a ‘second generation’ of case study methodology had begun to emerge, ‘one which bridged the gap between positivism and hermeneutics as a philosophical foundation of the social sciences’ (Johansson, 2003, pp. 6–7). Grounded theory emerged from the Chicago school of sociology as the first vehicle for this second generation of case studies (Glaser & Strauss, 1967). Grounded theorists employed an inductive methodology based on the use of detailed procedures for analysing data (Johansson, 2003). Yin (1981, 1984, 1994) further developed the methodology by transferring ‘experimental logic into the field of naturalistic inquiry and [combining] it with qualitative methods’ (Johansson, 2003, p. 7). Simultaneously, other writers ‘developed in the direction of eclecticism and pragmatism’ (Johansson, 2003, p. 7): ‘[r]ather than believing that one must choose to align with one paradigm or the other, I advocate … in favour of methodological appropriateness as the primary criterion for judging methodological quality’ (Patton, 1990, p. 39). Contemporary case study research has become a common study design within social sciences and is applied in many contexts such as law, history, politics, sociology