As noted in Quartz, this paper "would lay the foundation for decades of management research." The case study method is employed to use detailed accounts of specific companies in order to develop wider-reaching theories of management. If we view the method strictly from a statistical perspective it's quite weak: the examples are few in number and possibly not widely representative. But it does allow people to work with rich data unsuitable for statistical or even scientific analysis. To my mind, it's a mechanism for stimulation pattern recognition, and its success is based not only on the details of the case but also the investigator's background and experience; this is what helps them identify salient similarities between the cases. And as a teaching tool, to my mind, they perform a similar function, only in reverse, using detailed cases to put students into a series of rich environments where they can develop, tacitly, enough background and experience to get started in the real world.
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