This thesis is involved with exploration of key changes drivers and market
phenomena in the Southeast Asia and the development of new conceptual frameworks
for business environmental analysis of airlines. The research is constructed under the
phenomenology paradigm which adopts a coherentism approach and mainly takes
airline industry’s publications, statistics, and executives as units of analysis.
Hermeneutic phenomenology, a single-embedded case study, concurrent triangulation
mixed method, and grounded theory are all used as methodologies. Methods using
document reviews, interviews, and questionnaires are applied to surface the key
changes drivers, market phenomena and the perceptions of the importance of changes
factors. The collected data are analysed by content analysis, thematic analysis,
cognitive mapping analysis, constant comparative analysis and descriptive analysis to
classify, generalise and develop into proper forms.
The research reveals that ‘market’, ‘competition/strategy’, ‘regulation/policy’,
‘infrastructure/resource’, ‘cooperation’, ‘distribution’, ‘technology, and ‘broad’
factors are discovered as key change drivers. Their different importance levels are
measured by occurrences, density, centrality, and tail occurrences as root causes of
changes. The characteristics of their interrelationships are based on directional and
influential dimensions. There are 16 emerged changes/market phenomena and 11
generalised conceptual frameworks and 3 newly developed frameworks for analysing
the airline business environment. The quantitative findings from content analysis are
evaluated by inter-coder analysis which achieves kappa coefficient = 0.87 indicating
high reliability of the analysis. The qualitative findings are qualified through ten
criteria assessment of research quality. The deliverables provide both theoretical and
methodological contributions. The research limitations are found in some sources of
collected data and findings which are caused by scarce data availability and three
types of biases. The recommendations for future research into financial performance,
changes’ leading indicators and comparative in-depth study in other ASEAN
countries and regions are made