Page 7 - Introduction & Preamble
P. 7
The Case Study
Alfred North Whitehead
commented: “The
purpose of education is
not to fill a vessel but to
kindle a flame.” The
embodiment of this
sentiment is at the heart
of case method where
learning is by doing and
theory is used in anger.
Business situations have been explored through the use of
case studies since the early 1920s at Harvard Business School
as a means of demonstrating the link between theory and
practice and as a way of testing the student’s ability to apply
to a real-life situation the knowledge and understanding
acquired in class.
The term "case study" has multiple meanings for example, it
can be used to describe a unit of analysis (e.g., a case study of
a particular organisation) or to describe a research method.
The following focuses on the use of the case study as a unit of
analysis.
Case studies are designed to bring out the details from the
viewpoint of the case participants by using multiple sources
of data. 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 1995 put it succinctly when stating that:
