Bridgman, Cummings, and McLaughlin in their 2016 paper about the case method tell us that the conventional history of the development of business case teaching is missing some vital elements. Cases nowadays come from the perspective of management. There exists a management objective that the students are trying to deliver. This excessively managerial perspective is somewhat driven by a revision of history. Maybe we should be thinking differently about business school cases
Thinking Differently About Business School Cases
The authors argue that Wallace Donham, a Harvard Business School Dean in the 1920s, saw the case method differently. It was for far more than just presenting students with managerial problems to solve. Donham, they suggest, was relatively sympathetic to a union viewpoint. For instance, he saw the case as a method of helping the students to think more broadly about their role in society. The intention was not to produce a decision-maker who made the best decisions for the firm narrowly defined. Instead, the hope was to produce a manager who considered a wider set of aims, because that would deliver on social aims.
As the Great Depression hit Donham’s thinking apparently went farther.
“Donham now realized business schools should aspire to greater sources of legitimacy and seek to have a more profound impact on shaping the world around them at this time of crisis.”
Bridgman, Cummings, and McLaughlin, 2016, page 732
Erasing The Past
Post World War II, after the crisis of the Great Depression had passed, this larger vision was mostly forgotten. Donham’s aims, therefore, were erased from the conventional history. The view of the case as being almost exclusively about students solving managerial problems took stage as the conventional view. Now “… unions rarely appear in HBS case studies…”(Bridgman, Cummings, and McLaughlin, 2016, page 734). The authors argue that a fresh understanding of history gcan aid in allowing for a wider perspective. Modern cases would be better for more diverse perspectives in a broad sense. Above all, this includes the perspectives of workers looking up.
It is an interesting question. How much does revision/forgetting of the past impact our current thinking? I would certainly agree that business education could benefit from having cases with more varied viewpoints. The hope is that this would encourage bigger thinking about the world’s problems.
Read: Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings, and Colm McLaughlin (2016) “Restating the Case: How revisiting the development of the case method can help us think differently about the future of the business school.” Academy of Management Learning & Education 15 (4), 724-741.