Page 5 - Articles Written by JGJ EF DPS

INTRODUCTION

'The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new lands but in
seeing with new eyes.'

Marcel Proust

In his book “The Name of the Rose” Umberto Eco [Eco,1982] wrote that
the Bible was not meant to be read rather, it was meant to be
interpreted.” A sentiment reinforced by Bauman [Bauman, 2005], when
he wrote

“…..we have 89,000+ laws on the book to apply the basic
Ten Commandments”.

Case studies may be seen in a similar light. They are generally written to
reflect real life situations and like life, do not supply perfect information.
Instead, they require the reader to read between the lines, make
assumptions after re-ordering and combining the information provided,
and by drawing on experience generate solutions. It is therefore, through
this combination of stimuli, this marriage of theory, practice, and
experience that conclusions are generated. These conclusions provide
the key to good case solution generation for it is they that provide the
underpinning and justification for the actions and resolutions chosen.

So, ‘case studies are not meant to be read rather, they are meant to be
interpreted.’

This manifested itself in the realisation that students are not passive
recipients of knowledge. They do not simply soak-up and absorb
information and concepts. Nor does knowledge simply download directly
into their brains. They are sentient with a desire to use their accumulated
knowledge and experience not plug and play automatons [Wertheim

2006]. Business case studies allow them to use theory in anger and to
test the boundaries of their knowledge.
Case studies are designed to bring out the details from the viewpoint of
the case participants by using multiple sources of data [Tellis, 1997].
Essentially it is used to amalgamate disparate sources of information
into a structure and analysis that makes sense of a complex
unstructured problem. Reva Brown [Brown,1995] put it succinctly when
she observed that: