**3. Methodology**

To provide an inductive example of how corporate governance ideology influences the design and implementation of HR practices, a case study about across British universities is developed. The data collection was based on partially redacted document meeting minutes in remuneration committees (n = 67) and items such as registers, agendas, appendices and lists of figures. The number of sets of minutes analyzed ranged from one to nine across each university and they were taken from different points of time, but the majority of meetings took place after 2009. Also, information has been redacted in the minutes to make individuals unidentifiable.

The data analysis was based on three analytical steps [35]. The first step was to identify all the data fragments that directly or indirectly referred to senior staff pay by reading and interpreting the text within the context of their creation. The second step was an iterative process of open coding which grouped these data fragments into first-order HR practices. Some data fragments referred to multiple HR practices and these fragments were codable more than once. Data fragments that made claims about senior staff pay, but did not communicate directly or indirectly any rationale were discarded. The final step employed an iterative coding process which aggregated the HR practices into beliefs and ideologies about corporate governance.
