Informing with the Case Method Informing with the Case Method: a guide to case method Research, Writing, & Facilitation T. Grandon Gill Informing Science Press Informing with the Case Method: A Guide to Case Method Research, Writing and Facilitation Copyright © 2011 Informing Science Press All rights reserved. Permission to make digital or paper copy of part or all of these works for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies 1) bear this notice in full and 2) give the full citation on the first page. It is permissible to abstract these works so long as credit is given. To copy in all other cases or to republish or to post on a server or to redistribute to lists requires specific permission and payment of a fee. Contact [email protected] to request redistribution permission. ISBN: 978-1-932886-44-3 Published by Informing Science Press publishing arm of the Informing Science Institute: 131 Brookhill Court Santa Rosa California 95409 USA Phone: +1 707.324-317 Fax: +1 480 247 5724 ISPress.org InformingScience.org Printed in the US Informing with the Case Method This book is dedicated to my parents, Elizabeth Gill (1927-2011) and Richard T. Gill (1927-2010), who always loved my case studies. Acknowledgements This book has been made possible by the many faculty members who helped me learn how to write case studies—with particular thanks to Ray Goldberg at Harvard Business School, who got me started—and the many students who taught me much of what I know about facilitating a case discussion. With respect to the book itself, I owe a particular debt to Betty Boyd and Eli Cohen, whose tireless efforts in the name of the Informing Science Institute has made the product of this book—and many other books— possible. Without their encouragement and tolerance for my awkward prose, this project surely would have been abandoned. I would also like to thank those of my colleagues from the University of South Florida who voluntarily agreed to subject themselves to the first case method workshop ever constructed around this book and, of particular note, agreed to join me in a case development project that will—with any luck—lead to a transformation of our undergraduate capstone course. In this group are Kaushal Chari, Manish Agrawal, Al Hevner, Don Berndt, Joni Jones, Rick Will and Inge Wefes. I should also mention Bill Murphy, who enthusiastically agreed to represent the doctoral student community in this endeavor. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1043919. T. Grandon Gill Informing with the Case Method Santa Rosa, California: Informing Science Press. Contents Acknowledgements v Contents vii Preface ix Chapter 1: What is the Case Method Paradigm? 1 Chapter 2: Why Use the Case Method? 29 Chapter 3: Introduction to Case Design 53 Chapter 4: The Case Writing Process 81 Chapter 5: Designing Case Method Research 107 Chapter 6: Conducting Case Method Research 143 Chapter 7: Writing the Discussion Case 173 Chapter 8: Beyond the Paper Case 223 Chapter 9: Designing a Case Method Course 243 Chapter 10: Facilitating a Case Discussion 269 Chapter 11: Case Discussions beyond the Classroom 295 Chapter 12: The Case Method and the Informing Institution 323 Appendix A: Three Little Pigs 359 Appendix B: Case Writing Checklist 379 Appendix C: 10 Frequently Asked Questions 395 Appendix D: Sample Case Release Document 403 Appendix E: A Tale of Three Classes 407 vii Informing with the Case Method Appendix F: DSI 2005 Competition Entry 453 Appendix G: EMBA 2002 Case Series 463 Appendix H: Student Guide to Preparing a Case 497 Appendix I: Evaluation Plan for NSF Proposal 505 About the Author 533 References 535 Index 543 viii T. Grandon Gill Informing with the Case Method Santa Rosa, California: Informing Science Press. Preface There are a number of marvelous books that address the topic of the case method. If you are interested in facilitating cases, you can look to the classic book Teaching and the Case Method by Louis Barnes, C. Roland Christensen and Abby Hansen (1994). The collection of essays on the subject, Education for Judgment: The Artistry of Discussion Leadership by C. Roland Christensen, David Garvin and Ann Sweet (1991) is a wonder- ful and inspiring read as well. If your interest is case-based research, it would be nearly impossible to find a more authoritative source than Robert Yin’s (2009, 4th Edition) Case Study Research: Design and Methods, which (at last count) has been cited nearly 29,000 times, according to Google Scholar. There is even a new entry to the field, William Ellet’s (2007) The Case Study Handbook: How to Read, Discuss, and Write Persuasive- ly about Cases that is specifically aimed at the student. At first glance, then, the topic of case studies in education and research seems to be pretty well covered. Do we really need another book on the subject? I write this book believing the answer is yes. While I have great affec- tion for the classics, there are a number of issues facing most business faculty—not to mention faculty members from disciplines outside of business—that these books simply do not address. In writing this book, my intention is to offer some thoughts on some of these. Paradoxically, these omissions arise from the very fact that the authors of the classics are undisputed masters of their craft. Why this is a problem should become clear as I identify the three areas of focus for this book. The first issue that I feel must be considered is using the case method with a novice audience. Consider the following. When I was enrolled in the MBA program at Harvard Business School (HBS) in the early 1980s, the curriculum consisted of nearly 900 case discussion (15 per week) and—perhaps—as many as 20 class periods given over to lec- ture-style presentations. When I teach a case-method graduate course at my own institution, on the other hand, I am constrained to 11 case discussions (a 12 week semester). As it happens, I am also the only course in the entire program that employs pedagogy reasonably faithful to the case method, as it is normally defined. The math is very simple. ix Informing with the Case Method By the last day of my semester, my students have as much experience discussing cases as I did on Thursday afternoon of the first week of my two year MBA program at HBS. With the exception of faculty teaching at those rare institutions that have chosen to widely adopt the case method, the situation I face is commonplace. The second concern that existing books raise for me is their tendency to focus on isolated topics. Specifically, case facilitation, case writing and case research are treated as separable activities. I would argue that these three aspects of the case method—which I define quite broadly— are inseparable. For institutions that wish to achieve the full set of ben- efits provided by the case method, all three activities must be pursued in parallel. Perhaps this is why so few institutions have achieved success through the case method. In this book, I will argue that achieving such integration is precisely why those rare institutions have been so successful. Once you start believing that the case method can be a key to institu- tional success, how you get there becomes a real challenge. At leading institutions featuring the case method, such as HBS, the philosophy is largely learned through a period of apprenticeship. For example, I did not encounter any of the references mentioned in the first paragraph— excepting Yin—at any time during my 5 year doctorate at HBS. In- stead, I went out and wrote cases, facilitated discussions and did re- search under the guidance of faculty members who were masters of the craft. How can someone without the benefit of such an experience acquire such mastery? While I cannot offer any promises in this regard, I will at least provide some examples and easy-to-follow checklists that may be of service to individuals getting started. My final concern parallels the second, but deals specifically with atti- tudes about the case method. Lip service paid to the case method is easy to come by. In fact, when I looked for articles questioning its value in the business literature, I could find only one. When it comes to the decisions that exert a major influence on a faculty member’s career however, such as those relating to promotion and tenure (P&T), the pursuit of an integrated program of case teaching, writing and research does not carry much weight. In my own situation, the several dozen discussion cases that I have written were valued similarly to a typo- graphical error when it came time for P&T; taken as implicit evidence that my commitment to “real” research was insufficient because I spent so much time on my “hobby”. x Preface Having passed that particular hurdle, I can now laugh at it. But it would have been nice to have some systematic arguments as to why case stud- ies not only can be rigorous, they are likely to be the most rigorous form of research in many—if not most—settings where the fundamental test of our research vale is its applicability to practice. Drawing upon my re- cent book, Informing Business (2010), I argue that a compelling case for the case method can and should be made.