The Case Study Companion

Teaching, Learning and Writing Business Case Studies

Scott Andrews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000373776
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: I+D

The Case Study method of teaching and learning, adopted by business schools and management centres globally, provides an important function in management education, but employing it effectively can often be a challenge. This book provides practical insights, tools and approaches for both case teaching and writing, drawing on perspectives from expert practitioners around the world.

This book aims to critically examine different approaches to using case studies in group-based, participant-centred learning environments, exploring good practices for case teaching and learning. It provides guidance for case writers on various approaches to structuring case data, presentational formats, and the use of technology in the construction of different types of cases. It also demonstrates the use of the case method as a tool for assessment, supporting students' own development of cases to showcase good practice in organisations. The final section of this book showcases some of the resources available, providing links and reviews of additional material that can support future case teaching and writing practice, including publication.

The Case Study Companion is designed for lecturers using cases within their teaching across all management disciplines, as well as those training for Professional Development and Management Education qualifications. It will also be useful for postgraduate, MBA and Executive Education students wanting to make the most of case studies in their learning and assessments.

SECTION I

Case Teaching

1

Why Use a Case Study?

What have scholars from around the world had to say about their use of the case study?

‘The case method is not only the most relevant and practical way to learn managerial skills, it’s exciting and fun. But it can be confusing if you don’t know much about it’.

USA¹

‘The case method is a powerful approach to teaching and learning business subjects. Its main advantage is that it is a ‘question-oriented,’ as opposed to ‘solution-based,’ approach to teaching. It allows students to participate in ‘real-life’ decision making processes’.

Hong Kong²

‘A case is the description of a real situation with a protagonist who has to decide something. The data in the case are likely to be incomplete, as data often are in the real world’.

Switzerland³

‘The style of a teaching case is vivid, realistic, and convincing. It compels students to take the role of the decision maker in the organization, think as if they were him or her, and be analytical and creative’.

The Netherlands⁴

This section explores the following questions:

• How do your students learn?
• What motivates your learners in their studies?
• How do we know that learning is taking place and what can be done to ensure learning is effective and impactful?
• Is student learning through case studies genuinely meaningful and relevant to the needs of the current and future workplace?
• What could we be doing differently to enhance the participant’s capacity for learning with cases?
• How does the case fit into your programme planning?

The case study provides hands-on, practical opportunities to explore real-life management situations in organisations through examination and analysis, to enable learners to draw conclusions about management that they can take back into their real world once the class session has ended.

However, if the impact of the case session is to be effective, we first need to explore how the case approach engages with the learning process. No doubt the questions listed above, or many more like them, have crossed our minds at some point as we reflect on how we can build on the experiences and techniques that we currently deploy in our classrooms and management training centres with our learners. The case method has been widely used in a range of different contexts in management education across all management disciplines and at all college, university and professional levels.

Mini-cases are frequently presented in subject-themed management textbooks to provide practical applications to help students to unpack and explore the theories and models that the textbooks are promoting. Although this provides useful insights into learning with cases, these short narratives tend to focus more on showcasing good practice rather than providing a learning journey through which students can engage with the stories and situations, within a larger organisational context. These are normally structured to enable students to draw upon management knowledge, skills and behaviours to unpack learning through knowledge-input, discovery and reflective practices.

That the case method continues to be valued as a tool for learning is not in doubt (given that case studies have remained a core part of the staple diet of the management scholar for more than 100 years); however, their usage has more recently diversified across different developmental and competency levels, as well as across geographic and cultural boundaries.

The real question is not why use a case study, but rather how can you ensure engagement with the case method provides an effective, supportive and productive learning experience that motivates your specific group of learners, embedding lifelong learning and developing key employability skills that will play a vital role for future career enhancement?

1.1 How do your students learn?

‘Case method provides the means for allowing students to either develop theory or make their own theories-in-action explicit in a forum where they can be re-examined in ways that are not likely to happen elsewhere’.

USA⁵

Before we tackle the intricacies of developing teaching approaches with case studies, it is important to reflect on learning itself and more specifically how the learners whom we encounter each week in our classrooms engage with the notion of learning (be they in real classrooms studying face-to-face or in virtual spaces). We all learn differently, and yet as scholars we often tend to deploy generic, homogenous learning approaches to most forms of student programme delivery.

If we are to truly embrace effective impactful learning in the classroom then we need to ensure then it is tailored to the competencies, needs, and capacities of our specific learners. To do this, we need to know how they learn best and how the ‘secret histories’ that they bring into the classroom can be used to help and inform their approaches to learning through case methodologies. In other words, we need to really know our learners. Only then can these case class sessions be tailored to the known learner-types as they present themselves in our classrooms. There is no single approach to delivering through the case method, and it is highly likely that some approaches to case delivery will be more effective than others in different contexts. It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to know your learners’ backgrounds, habits, preferred styles of learning and general interests. The more we can understand about our learners, the more we can tailor our approaches to meeting their best preferred style of learning.

Lessons Learnt

We often learn best through our own classroom mistakes. I have a vivid memory of an awkward moment in a classroom many years ago when I had been asked to present a case study to a group of first year undergraduates studying globalisation as part of a marketing degree programme. I was no more than ten minutes into the case discussion, which focused around the challenges facing the CEO of a major global business which was about to adopt a new marketing project, when one of the students raised her hand and called time on the discussion. She told me how she had only been at university for eight weeks, was 18 years old, had never previously had a job, nor left home, and was not only unaware of how global businesses operate, but also, she did not even know what a ‘CEO’ meant. It became immediately clear that I had pitched this case far too high for this individual who, understandably, was not at the developmental level needed to be able to address the issues raised in the case discussion, on the basis of the viewpoint that we were exploring. I asked her what she wanted to do when she graduated, and she said she would like to be a marketing executive. So, I invited her (and her class colleagues) to rethink the context from the perspective of a marketing executive: to imagine she had just graduated and was in her first role as an executive in a large business that had offices located in many different countries. I informed her that one of the ‘big bosses’ had requested that as a new team of marketing executives, she and her colleagues were being asked to take on a new marketing project for the company. On hearing this, the troubled student and her colleagues immediately engaged with this revised context and happily put their creative minds to the challenges that had been proposed. It was clear to me that I had not sufficiently endeavoured to understand the former knowledge and life experiences of the group in the classroom prior to starting the course, to be able to satisfactorily pitch the case discussion. A lesson quickly learnt.

When case tutors have been asked for their opinions of how students learn, the following list includes commonly repeated responses:⁶

• Case learning is dependent on the learner’s age and experience of management in the workplace.
• People learn differently in different cultures.
• We only learn what we are interested in learning.
• Learning depends on a desire and willingness to learn.
• We learn best when we are free to create our own response to a situation.
• Learning depends on not knowing the answers.
• We all learn in our own way.
• Learning is largely an emotional experience.
• To learn is to change.

Undoubtedly, not everyone will agree with all of these statements, but they reflect common points of view which have subsequently informed approaches to case delivery.

PAUSE FOR A MOMENT: take another look at this list of viewpoints and ask yourself to what extent do you agree or disagree with each statement. Then ask yourself how your views on these statements are reflected in your own teaching style.

Arguably if at least one of the following three criteria is achieved at the end of a case session, then we might agree that an individual has learnt:

• The individual knows something they did not know before; or
• They can do something (or do it better) than they could before; or
• They have formed a view about something that they did not hold before.

So, before you being to plan the case delivery schedule, pause to consider how the construction of your programme is going to affect learning, specific to the features of your known learner group.

1.2 Motivating learners

One of the frequently raised questions when meeting with case scholars is how do we meet the challenge to motivate learners to engage with the case study process? In contrast to more traditional and passive approaches to teaching and learning, the case method relies on a certain level of engagement and participation on the part of student – both before, during, and after a case class discussion-session. If the student is not prepared, then it is more likely that the learning benefits of the case session will diminish, and this can serve to further demotivate the learner, forming an ever-diminishing return which can easily spiral out of control. Therefore, it is important to ensure that there is student engagement and participation from the onset. Both the choice of case and the approach to case delivery play key roles in ensuring that the learner is motivated and better predisposed to the intended learning outcomes of the session. This could involve investment in case writing to provide resources that are more familiar to the learner and potential use of digital technologies that promote engagement with the case narrative.

In more traditional contexts, case studies have been perceived as lengthy paper-based exercises that require a strong commitment to reading, extensive pre-class analysis, and exercise work. If a student is not used to this style of learning then introducing the case concept with a 40+ page document of an in-depth, complex management situation, based on a large company located a long way from the student’s home, might not be the most motivating starting point. Chapter 3 explores types of case study and will provide insights into the best ways of selecting a case to ensure the balance is struck between maintaining student motivation and ensuring the key learning objectives of the programme are achieved with the technology available. Chapters 5 and 6 examine different approaches to engaging with the case learning session, to foster curiosity and interest with the student group, which promotes engagement and participation.

1.3 Capturing effective and impactful learning

One of the perils of the case method is closing the session with an assumption that the programme’s intended learning objectives have been achieved. Just because a student has participated in a case study that explores, for example, key aspects of change management, this does not meant that the student has necessarily lear...