The empirical material for this paper comes from three
qualitative, retrospective case studies of JVs in Swedish
municipalities3 that are in the waste disposal business and were created to exploit economies of scale. All three JVs are
joint-stock companies with the municipalities as the only
shareholders. Our choice of the case study method reflects
our understanding of the difficulty involved in controlling
organizations and in mapping large, complex control packages
that are interrelated with organizational processes
and their surroundings (Otley, 1980; Malmi and Brown,
2008). When JVs – with multiple owners who need to coordinate
control of a company – are the objects of study, this
difficulty increases. Case studies are thus appropriate for
this research since they allow the researcher to follow and
explore new and emerging aspects of control (Emsley and
Kidon, 2007) and to describe the interaction of a number of
variables (Yin, 2003).
Case studies in general and multiple case studies in
particular provide material for analytical generalisations.
While case studies are empirical templates for examining
and refining theory, they are unsuitable for making statistical
generalisations about populations (Yin, 2003). Our
conclusions are theories that should be subject to examination
in other contexts in an on-going process of developing
our knowledge of the studied domain. Our ambition in
presenting our cases is to confirm and extend existing
knowledge based on a holistic understanding of their settings.