Consistent with the method of QCA depicted above, the coding of “publications”, in the
first phase was based on common categories/themes in the study of EA (e.g.
leadership, policy focus, organisational structure, etc.) provided by Swafford (1990),
and later used by Oplatka (2007, 2008). With a list of these themes at hand, the author
tried at the outset to match every publication title (including those presented at
conferences) to the appropriate category. This entailed a process of recursive and
reflexive movement between concept development, sampling, data-collection,
coding-data, and analysis-interpretation.