Doing research in an analogue time

© Copyright 2026 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. First version, 27 April 2026.

Desk in analogue timesWriting my white paper “On failures in academia: my PhD journey” caused me to look back at the bi-monthly “PhD newsletters” that I had sent to my supervisors and the letters and emails we exchanged at the time, the mid 1990s. The advantage of not being co-located with my supervisors and not having access to virtual meetings, frequent travel, or international phone calls is that I have a fairly complete paper record of my reflections and decisions during my PhD.

Reading this after more than thirty years, even I – who didn’t use a personal computer until I was 23 – was struck at how different doing research in those analogue times was. So, I decided to write up a separate white paper on this, documenting his different era before most of us have completely forgotten it. I hope that for older researchers this white paper brings back (good) memories and that for younger researcher it illustrates that even though research can be hugely challenging these days, it was by no means a piece of cake in the “good old days” either.

Below I discuss how these analogue times materialized in communicating with colleagues, sourcing relevant literature, finding respondents’ contact details, designing a mail survey, and access to referencing and payment technologies. Before doing, however, so I am setting the scene by discussing major technological developments in the decade before my PhD. If you want to skip to a specific section, you can use the table of contents below.

Table of contents

Technology in the decade before my PhD

Communicating – letters, faxes, and hesitant email use

Sourcing literature – musty cellars and photocopier fumes

Creating a list of addresses – book after book after book…

Designing a mail survey – how to beat response fatigue

Engaging in a side-project – referencing management & payment technology

Was doing research in analogue times better or worse?

Technology in the decade before my PhD

When I was 16 my parents sent me to typing lessons. That was quite forward-looking of them; at the time typewriters were mostly used by professional writers and journalists. They were certainly not widely present in schools or universities. I learned through the Scheidegger system where all keys were covered by colored caps so that you had to learn typing blind. As electric typewriters were way too expensive, I got a mechanical typewriter at home and used it to type up summaries of the books I had to read for Dutch, English, German, and French exam subjects at secondary school.

Typewriter

I can still hear the sound it made when you moved it to the next line with carriage return, remember how heavy the keys were, and how the little metal hammers with the letters at the end would jam if you typed too quickly. I can still smell the chemical smell of the correction fluid – Tipp-Ex which came in small bottles with a little brush – that you used if you had made a mistake. You really needed to wait until it had dried completely before typing the correct letter or it would become a big blurry mess and you would need to redo the whole page. A lot of patience was required! During my first degree – a 3.5-year professional degree in Business & Languages – and the first year of my second degree – a 4-year university degree in International Business – I used that mechanical, and later an electric, typewriter to type up my assignments.

Personal computers were still exotic at the time. In the second year of my first degree (1984-1985) I first learned about them, being asked to memorize the definitions of its various components. But I didn’t actually see a personal computer until I was 21. It was a non-IBM variant located at the Mathematics labs in my boyfriend’s (technical) university. He would smuggle me into the lab in the evenings when nobody was there, so I could type up my thesis. I remember constantly looking over my shoulder as I was so scared that I would get caught.

After finishing my degree in January 1987 I worked for four months at a tertiary education organization called ITC (International Training Centre), which provided courses for students from what were then called “developing countries”. I was charged with writing up the final evaluations of their funded project work and providing translations into English. I used a computer to do this, though I can’t recall what type it was. I had two roommates, one in his early thirties, who occasionally used a computer, but mostly relied on pen and paper, getting me to type it up. As to the older one, I only ever saw him using a pencil, eraser and ruler to laboriously create and verify budgets.

In the Summer of 1987, I worked for six weeks at the secretariat of the university department where I was about to start my second degree in Autumn. They used a rather idiosyncratic Océ Word Processor. It was a device that looked a bit like later personal computers, though with a bigger screen, and could only be used for word-processing. It wasn’t very user-friendly, you had to press save regularly to avoid using your text. Unfortunately, it had an annoying quirk was that it only saved the text above the cursor. There was a lot of cursing in that office until we got used to that.

In 1988 my boyfriend and I got our first (shared) personal computer. It looked like the left-hand image above and cost about 6,000 guilders, payable in 30 monthly installments and amounting to about four months of our net income. It was a very good deal because it was bought via his father’s PC Privé project, a project allowing employees to buy a computer for home use on favorable terms. It had a 20MB hard-disk, the size of a single Power Point presentation with a few large images these days, and less than 1MB of random-access memory.

In the late 1980s my boyfriend did his civil service (a civic replacement for army conscription), studying decision-making in medical expert systems in the philosophy department of the same university where I was studying at the time. As a graduate from a technical university, he became the resident IT administrator for a department of computer-illiterate philosophers. They would switch off their computers at the end of the day without saving their work, surprised to not find it back the following day. He has also had to dismantle computers as they tried to push in floppy disks (the thin 5¼ inch ones) into small cracks in the towers rather than the official slot.

When I saw my first Macintosh computer in 1991 (see right-hand image above) it felt like I had landed in a Science fiction film… I had never seen anything so sleek looking, it made our clunky grey IBM PC like a stone age machine. I am surprised it took another 20+ years before I became a dedicated Mac user, but then again, their premium prices might have had a lot to do with that. 

Communicating – letters, faxes, and hesitant email use

These days we are calling virtual meetings at the drop of a hat, we send voice mails when we have to convey complicated matters, and we instant message constantly on WhatsApp. The fact that I dislike all three of these communication methods, and don’t really use the latter two probably shows my age. My medium of choice is email, the communication method that was “the latest thing” when I started my PhD.

Intermezzo: our reaction to technology by Douglas Adams:

  1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
  2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
  3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

I still remember vividly the first time I saw email being used. It was 1991, I was 26 and was working as a free-lancer at the Open University after completing my second degree. All Open University employees had these futuristic-looking small cream-coloured computers on their desk called Macs. The computer was integrated into the screen rather than being in a separate “box” (see image in the previous section). It looked like something beamed in from the future.

But the best thing was that they could send each other messages with it. My husband is a software engineer, so I think he probably told me about email before, but I had never seen it used. The OU system was internal only; it took a few more years before email could be sent between organizations. Even then, it remained exotic for another few years still, but by 1995 I had an email address both at work and at home. But we were early adopters. Having email at home was still very unusual and even at universities it wasn’t yet commonly used for external communication.

Much of my communication with other academics still took place through letters or – if you wanted “instant” communication – faxes. Remember how the thermal fax paper meant these faxes became illegible after a while? Letters were so dominant that I would sometimes prepare a letter for my PhD supervisors on original letterhead and then send that by email. Letters were still the only reliable way to communicate for interaction with most other academics, who were invariably older than I was, and for submission of articles to journals.

Email was adopted quickly by younger academics like me, though. As soon as I had access to email, I set up YAN (Young Academics Network), a network of young academics I had met at European conferences. We would communicate purely by email, providing each other with advice. We felt smug at being at the forefront of new technology, pitying the older generation of academics who still wrote letters, in some cases still by hand. My Masters supervisor used a pencil for most things; he would put the stump behind his ear when not using it.

Email did become more widespread fairly quickly though, as even older academics saw its usefulness. However, the question “do you have an email address” was still very common until the late 1990s, as it could not be taken for granted that someone used email. Moreover, as your email had to be downloaded manually through dial-up network connections that were often overloaded, it was by no means instant communication. The film You’ve got mail – a romcom with Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks – is a cute illustration of this era.

Journal submission was also decided analogue. My first proper article (See: What is the story behind your first paper) was mailed to the publisher by snail mail. When, after acceptance, the typesetters completely messed up my beautiful figure, I mailed the editor a floppy disk with the figure so that it could be included “as is” in the article.

Review requests were typically sent out by snail mail too with a paper copy of the manuscript included. (This is why we still have the by now redundant practice of double-spacing our manuscripts; it was meant to create space for manual annotations on paper copies). Up till the mid 2000s, many review requests I received in Australia would take 4-6 weeks to arrive as international mail was so slow. Imagine the delay if I had declined the review request.

Sourcing literature – musty cellars and photocopier fumes

Ever wondered why reference lists were so much shorter in the past? Part of it is the fact that academics simple published less. But much of it had to do with the difficulty of getting access to the literature. These days getting access to journals articles is a piece of cake. Most articles can be accessed with a few clicks of the mouse and within minutes if not seconds, especially if you have access to a university library. Book chapters can be a bit harder to source, but usually contacting the author by email or through ResearchGate resolves this too.

To all intents and purposes, the Internet didn’t really exist in the mid-1990s. In any case, dial-up modems and connections were so slow that getting the information from the library shelves would usually be much quicker. This made sourcing articles very cumbersome. It involved making numerous trips to the musty cellars of university libraries – sometimes even in other cities – and dragging large stacks of bound volumes to the photocopier.

You would also be spending lots of money on photocopying, just photocopying one article would cost you more than a take-away coffee. [If that had existed at the time that is, coffee on the run was still few years in the future too; 1990s coffee in the Netherlands came in ceramic cups and was consumed sitting down in a café]. In addition, you would risk severe bouts of nausea from the fumes of the heated toner that photocopiers used. And again, slow science ruled; I spent looooots of time waiting when someone else was using the photocopier or cursing in desperation when a previous users had left it broken without alerting the technician.

Getting access to articles became easier in the 21st century when library catalogues moved online and articles could be downloaded from the comfort of your own (home) office. However, the use of paper copies of journal articles remained very common until 10-15 years ago. Below left is a picture of my two of the three black Ikea filing cabinets in my home office in Australia, they were filled to the brim with thousands of articles, stored alphabetically.

Likewise, many academics would keep physical issues of journals on their shelves. On the right-hand image beady eyes might be able to distinguish Strategic Management Journal [two shades of pink on the right], Organization Studies [middle one of the bottom shelves], the three then existing Academy of Management Journals AMR, AMJ, and AME (renamed AMP) [all at the second shelf from the right]. Finally, you can just see a little peek of the blue of Journal of International Business Studies at the second shelf from the left.

Keeping up-to-date with the literature in the mid-1990s consisted of browsing through the most recent issues of journals, found on the shelves of the library’s reading room. Some universities had librarians circulating folders with TOCs from relevant journals to academics. I still remember the pale-yellow manila folders with stacks of photocopied TOCs. Their circulation was often delayed for months because a colleague lost them amongst the piles of paper on their desk or went on a long holiday without passing the folder on to the next person on the list.

These days, forward searching, i.e. finding articles that cite an important paper is trivial. Back then finding out whether a specific article had been cited by others involved going through the paper version of the (Social) Science Citation Index. Even though this publication had paper so thin you could almost see through it, was incredibly heavy. For my first article that traced the citation network around expatriate failure rates (see below), it took many months to simply track all the forward and backwards references.

Creating a list of addresses – book after book after book…

After several unsuccessful attempts to convince one or more MNCs to allow me to survey all their subsidiaries, I decided to run a cross-sectional international mail survey during my PhD. My initial selection was based on the Global 500 as published yearly in Fortune. In order to be able to investigate industry and country effects I decided to collect data in subsidiaries of 128 multinationals from nine home countries (USA, Japan, Germany, France, UK, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands) in eight specific industries (electronics, computers, paper, motor vehicles, pharmaceuticals, food, petrol (products), and chemicals. The subsidiaries themselves were located in 22 different host countries spread over six broad cultural clusters: Anglo, Germanic, Latin-European, Nordic, Latin American and Asian.

Obviously, for a mail survey I needed the subsidiaries’ mailing addresses. These days getting access to these would be a piece of cake; back then I already predicted to my supervisors that this information would be available on CD-ROM soon. (I was right, in my next international survey I used Dun & Bradstreet CD-ROMs). But back in 1995 the only option was paper address books. Fortunately, I had found a book that was published in 1994 which included branch locations of MNCs, including all those I had selected. The book even listed the name of the managing directors for some of the subsidiaries.

As I expected a response rate of below 1% when sending a letter to “Dear Managing Director”, I decided to try and find the names of the remaining managing directors too. I discovered that the Economic Information Service (EIS) of the Ministry of Economic Affairs in the Hague had address books of companies for every country in the world, which also included the names of senior managers. These books were intended for companies who wanted to build up connections with foreign businesses, but academics were also allowed to visit their library to consult the books. So, in a quest to find the remaining names, I went on the first of what became many train trips to the Hague. 

When comparing one of the addresses from the 1994 book with the more recent EIS books, I discovered that my original addresses might be out-of-date. So, in addition to finding all the names of MDs, I also verified all the addresses. And while I was at it, I also added their phone and fax numbers, year of establishment, number of employees, and turnover. In all, I spent about 15 days (and lots of money on train tickets to the Hague) in that library, laboriously going through a total of 40 different books. My head was literally full of books.

It was only after I had completed this whole process that I came up with the luminous idea to order company reports from all of the 128 headquarters in my sample. It turned out that – beyond a host of useful information on corporate strategy, that I later used to triangulate my survey data, and financials – many also included a complete list of addresses of their key subsidiaries. So, I was able to correct a few more. The only person not happy with all of this was our postman. Back then, post in the Netherlands was delivered by bicycle, so for weeks his bicycle bags were heaving with dozens of thick company reports. After a few days he started asking me how many more there were to come.

Once all the names had been collected and all addresses checked, they needed to be typed into a database in order to create personalised letters with a mail merge command in a word processor. All in all, the process of completing the list of addresses took me about two months full time. However, I could import this database into SPSS so that I had all basic information about the subsidiaries available in SPPS.

An unexpected bonus was that I ended up writing up two articles (partly) based on the data I had collected for the nationality of the managing director for 1650 subsidiaries. During the mind-numbingly boring task of verifying names and addresses I amused myself by guessing – based on the first and last name – what the nationality of the managing director was. Only later it occurred to me that in the process I had collected the largest available database of staffing choices for managing director positions in multinationals.

So, in a research context that prioritized conceptualization upon conceptualization without much empirical work, I used this data to test the propositions that had been put forward in an earlier article. I then expanded the data with another 1,000 observations and used this – as well as my own survey results – to write up a more substantial article. Although the first article sank without a trace, the second became quite highly cited – with 549 citations it is in my top-20 most cited articles – and was even reprinted.

  • Harzing, A.W. (1997) Research Note: About the paucity of empirical research in IHRM: A test of Downes framework of staffing foreign subsidiaries, Journal of International Management, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 153-167. Available online... - Related blog post
  • Harzing, A.W. (2001) Who's in charge: an empirical study of executive staffing practices in foreign subsidiaries, Human Resource Management, Summer 2001, vol. 40, no. 2, pp. 139-158. [Reprinted in International Human Resource Management, Sage Publications 2009] Available online... - Publisher's version - Related blog post

Designing a mail survey – how to beat response fatigue?

After two months of hard work, I had a complete and clean set of names and addresses. So, I embarked on a pilot study sending out 100 questionnaires to see what response rate I could expect. At 5% the response rate was low. That was not unusual for this population – I later heard many PhD students struggled to even reach 5% – but certainly less than ideal.

The problem was that my prospective respondents – senior managers in multinationals – were extremely busy people with many demands on their time. My hunch was that they would be more likely to spend the time if they could in some way connect to the beneficiary, i.e.  me. So, beyond addressing them by their name and designing an easy to complete questionnaire, I thought up a lot of ways to do this.

Building a connection…

First, rather than immediately bombarding my respondents with a questionnaire, I tried to build up our connection slowly by mailing an announcement postcard a week before the questionnaire. This postcard included some key practical questions that could be answered by participating in the research project (see below). Looking at these now, I find them a bit simplistic, but maybe that was exactly their appeal?

The card also featured a business-like picture of me (in my home office) in front of carefully chosen business books. I thought this might not only help creating a connection but also remind these senior managers (likely to be in their fifties or sixties) of their own children and “soften them up”.

However, I also reasoned that my prospective respondents needed me to connect in some way with their own country. So, I came up with the idea of a committee of recommendation, featuring an academic from every country that was included in the survey. This committee was included on the reverse of the announcement post-card, but also on the questionnaire that followed a week later (see picture below).

Although I had no illusion that the managers would know these academics, the universities they were affiliated with might ring a bell. The managers or their children might even have studied at them. But even if they didn’t, it would still create a "local" connection. I was savvy enough to ask famous academics such Geert Hofstede and John Dunning first before I asked all the other academics. They all said yes!

Ease of return and offer of results

Second, after completing the questionnaire, I wanted to make it as effortless as possible for my respondents to return it. So, I organized an international reply-paid service number and designed the questionnaire so to that the last page included this number and a space for them to write down their address details. All the respondents needed to do was fold the questionnaire in three, staple it, and put it in the mail. For a picture of how this looked see the image on the left below.

Third, I reasoned that respondents might be interested in receiving a summary of the results and recommendations. Hence, the option of requesting these was provided in two ways. If respondents were happy to provide their address details, they could include those on the questionnaire.

If they’d rather not have their details linked to their responses, they could return a separate postcard that was included in the package. This postcard also doubled up as an opportunity to indicate that the addressee didn’t want to participate in the project. This gave me valuable information of why respondents didn’t want to participate and also saved me from having to send them a reminder.

Of course, I did keep my promise to inform my respondents of the results of my study and sent a 20-page company report to all participants. I am quite proud of what I managed to put together (see image below). Remember, this was nearly 30 years ago! Software packages were nowhere near as sophisticated as they are these days.

It seems my respondents appreciated the reports as I did receive quite a few thank-you’s. Some companies even paid for detailed reports on specific topics, or tailored industry or country reports that I offered for a fee. Even though creating these additional reports took another few weeks of time that I could have spent on writing my thesis, it allowed me to defray most of the costs I incurred for the mail survey.

In all, I created one summary report, three detailed reports on strategy & structure, control mechanisms, and expatriation, five industry-specific reports and four home country reports. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the general report even acquired some citations (none of which were self-citations!). There were no less than nine of them, with the last one in 2021.

Making them laugh…

Finally, I felt something "quirky" was needed to get my prospective respondents "over the line". So, in the cover letter – that was individually signed with a blue pen to create a personal connection – I tried to appeal to them on a human level and make them smile. If you can get someone to laugh with you, it is much easier to build up a connection with them.

So, I stapled a teabag to the letter, encouraging my respondents to take a short 5-minute tea break and complete the questionnaire there and then. In the reminder, I sent them a sachet of instant coffee, joking that the reason they hadn’t responded yet might be that they preferred coffee over tea.

You can read the letter below; the coffee sachet has gone, but you can still see the staples. I vividly remember spending countless days signing and folding letters and stapling on the tea bags/coffee sachets. I had to be extremely careful not to puncture the tea bag/coffee sachet.

And in case you are wondering, thirty years ago there were no ethics committees in the Netherlands requiring plain language statements or signed statements of consent. Academics were just trusted to do the right thing. There were also no strict regulations about sending “foodstuffs” by mail.

Response rates

The results of all these efforts was a very decent response rate of 20%. This was significantly higher than the 6-16% that was common for company surveys even in the late 1980s. After the turn of the century response rates for PhD student surveys rapidly deteriorated further to well below 5%. But even in the 1990s companies were already over-surveyed. Here are some of the responses I received from those who didn’t want to respond.

Roughly 100 requests of this kind are received by ... (company name) weekly from all over the world. We had to decide not to answer any anymore in order to set no precedence.
In recent times the increase in requests to participate in questionnaires and surveys has grown enormously and is now at a level where our staff are no longer able to cope with them without serious interference to their normal work. We have, therefore, been obliged to adopt, reluctantly, the policy of not becoming involved in questionnaires, surveys and returns--whatever their nature or extent--unless they are a statutory requirement.
We appreciate your interest in ... (company name) and wish it were possible to answer each of your questions for your thesis. Unfortunately, we receive many letters similar to yours, and because of limited time and manpower, it is impossible to respond favourably to every request. To be fair to all, it was decided that none be responded to in order to concentrate our efforts in providing our customers with quality products and service.
Too many, too often.

It was very gratifying, however, that some respondents really went out of their way to help me. One addressee had been transferred from Singapore to Indonesia, but his mail was forwarded and I received the questionnaire back with a courier service (my international response paid didn’t work from Indonesia).

The advantage was that after investing all this work into designing the international mail survey I managed to write up two papers on the topic. One dealt with my general experiences in international mail surveys and waspublished before I submitted my PhD. The other tested a range of explanations for response rate differences, and was published a few years after I completed my PhD.

Engaging in a side-project – referencing management & payment technology

During my PhD, I engaged in a number of side projects. One of them clearly illustrates how 1995 really seems like a life-time ago in terms of the technologies we used. I participated as a junior researcher in the International Company Network, funded by the EU Human Capital and Mobility program. Founded in 1993, it was an international network with representatives of universities in eight different countries, conducting research on multinational companies.

One of the network’s tasks was to create a bibliography. That might appear a little odd now, but as you can read under “Sourcing literature” finding references wasn’t easy in those days. Systematic management of bibliographies and references was even more difficult. At the time I was one of the few academics who had entered their articles into a database (Microsoft Access in case you are curious), coding each article for its topics. The currently dominant product – Endnote – had been launched a few years before, but it only became widely used in the 2000s.

So, even though I was a junior researcher, I was given the task of creating this bibliography. From recollection it contained about 300-500 core references on HRM and IR in multinational companies. Later, I used the reference base in my PhD to expand this to more than 1,000. Richard Hyman, a senior researcher in the project and a key scholar in the field, had just launched his new European Journal of Industrial Relations. He suggested I might as well write up a short research note on the bibliography in his, which I did.

  • Harzing, A.W. (1995) Research Note: An International Bibliography, European Journal of Industrial Relations, vol. 1, no. 3, pp. 405-412.

I even created a leaflet (see below) to sell the biography at cost price to other academics. It was before the euro was introduced, so the bibliography was priced in ECU (European Currency Unit). However, I had to ask buyers to pay in guilders (the Dutch currency at the time) and do so by international giro or cheque in order to be able to access the money without incurring substantial costs. The fees for cashing a cheque in a foreign currency would have wiped out most of the cheque’s value.

As you can see on the leaflet, I did offer the option of paying by cash in a wide range of currencies too. International direct bank transfers were still unusual – and expensive – in those days, and very few academics would have had credit cards. Payment wallets such as PayPal and contactless payment were still a long time in the future.

The leaflet had to be returned to me by snail main and I used the same reply-paid number I was using for my PhD survey. That way buyers didn’t have to figure out the (international) postage. The bibliography was delivered in Microsoft Access and dBase (a general format that could be imported into different database systems) on a 3.5-inch floppy disk.

Remember this was before the wide-spread adoption of email, before the internet, before online file transfer services, and before memory sticks. CD-ROMs did exist but were very expensive and most computers didn’t yet have a CD-ROM player.

I can’t recall how many of these bibliographies were sold, but from recollection they were quite popular. As you can see below, I received orders from as far away as Hong Kong.

Was doing research in analogue times better or worse?

It was neither; it just was. As academics, just like people in general, we simply operate within the systems and constraints we encounter. This is true for social and political systems, but it is certainly true for technological systems. Yes, much of the work I had to do during my PhD was incredibly time-consuming, seriously limiting what I could do. But that was true for everyone, and thus expectations and standards were different.

However, an advantage of the lack of sophisticated technology was that there appeared to be more time for thinking and deliberation. Our attention wasn’t as fragmented as it is these days. As a result, there was also a stronger focus on responsible research processes than on merely chasing research outcomes (see Sathish & Harzing, 2026).

That said, researchers operated in isolation and even ground-breaking research might not be discovered by others until many years later. There was no “online first”, so – unless you were embedded into an academic network sending each other pre-prints by snail mail or email – the first time you would hear about a study could be years after it was accepted. Conferences were pretty much the only way to keep up to date with work in progress, and as such were arguably much more important than they are today.

So, whenever you look back to research published 10, 20, 30, 40, or even 50 years ago, remember that the circumstances under which it was conducted may have been very different from what they are today. Sometimes, this means the work is now effectively obsolete, but there are still golden nuggets that have withstood the passage of time. Usually, they revolve around ground-breaking ideas rather than research methods or results; it wouldn’t be a bad thing if we had a bit more of that in current-day research!

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