In the field of business communication, the history of creating the case method at Harvard Business School remains somewhat of a legendary tale. Occasionally, a short one- or two-paragraph history of HBS is offered in articles about case study pedagogy, but more frequently arguments for the pedagogical utility or criteria for good cases are cited from HBS faculty without any
acknowledgement of the larger tradition these quotes are embedded in (see Greenwood, 1993; Zhao, 1996). The full story of HBS has been recounted in several different volumes written by faculty, graduates, and administrators between the years of 1931 and 2003 (see McNair, 1954; Copeland M. T., 1958; Barnes, Christensen, & Hansen, 1994; Garvin, 2003). While this history is too large to unpack in its entirety here, these texts resoundingly show that the
history of the case method is the story of faculty support, research infrastructure, and creative funding channels.19
When HBS was formed in 1908, it was not without serious consternation in the college, writ large. At the turn of the 1900s, business was not an academic
19 It is important to recognize the internal biases of these texts, as they are largely written to sing the praises of the case method itself. However, McNair’s (1954) history is a very notable
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discipline, and, in fact, it was viewed as a vocational trade and a stain on the liberal arts by both academia and the public. As Melvin Copeland, one of the first HBS faculty members and primary chronicler of the school’s history, recounts, “by many professors and by numerous Harvard alumni, it was deemed to be degrading for the University to offer instruction in the venal subject of Business Management” (1958, p. 17).20 Even though studying commerce was gaining
acceptance as a venerable field of study in the early 1900s, which included courses in geography and economic theory, the practice of business administration
was seen as a vocational trade that was learned through rough-and-tumble transactions, bootstrapping, and bartering in the real world.21 If HBS was to be
successful, administrators had to overcome a two-prong problem: the public skepticism about designing a curriculum that could outperform on-the-job training and the immense difficulty in actually designing that curriculum.
Under Edwin F. Gay’s guidance, the first dean of HBS, the faculty began developing a field-specific case study pedagogy, and in 1912 he instituted two pedagogical experiments to begin moving in that direction: the use of living cases
20 One professor went so far as to say that the pursuit of business, “sull[ied] the robes of Chaucer and Shakespeare with seekers of gold” (Eds. Barnes, Christensen, & Hansen, 1994, p. 39). 21 For modern audiences, this view of business might be difficult to comprehend, but imagine what sentiment would be voiced if Harvard announced tomorrow that they will be offering HVAC and plumbing certificate programs in the fall semester: whereas the pursuit of an electrical engineering degree is acceptable at a university, the pursuit of an HVAC certificate is not. This classist divide that exists today between trade schools and liberal arts institutions certainly existed in the early 20th century as well.
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and embryo cases. The first experiment began as a joint collaboration in 1912 between Dean Gay and A. W. Shaw in order to find a new way to teach Business Policy. Shaw was the publisher of the business magazine System, and he joined the Administrative Board at HBS in 1911. Dean Gay was able to convince Shaw to give even more of his time to HBS as a lecturer for the course Business Policy (Copeland M. T., 1954). Since there was no existing business case studies at the time of his hire, Business Policy drew upon about 15 outside businessmen who would come into the class and present living cases (also dubbed walking cases) for the students (Cruikshank, 1987, p. 71). Specifically, these guest instructors were asked to, “present to the class a problem from their own desk,” which then opened up to a larger classroom question and answer session (Copeland M. T., 1954).
As an example of one living case, Jeffrey Cruikshank (1987) has shown how Shaw asked the president of Sherwin-Williams Paint Company, Walter H. Cottingham, to present on his agenda for an important board meeting that he was attending just following Shaw’s class. For the next class meeting, students were asked to craft a written analysis of the issue that concerned Cottingham’s board along with their own proposed solution, which was then discussed as a class. On their third class meeting, the guest lecturer, here Cottingham, would return to discuss and evaluate the students’ analyses of their real-life issue
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(Copeland M. T., 1954). Although Gay and Shaw might have seen these living cases as bridges to a more robust case method approach, live cases did not
demand the same research and compositional time constraints. Rather, live cases required time to build relationships with industry executives, and this had the additional benefit of exposing students to potential future employers.
In addition to Shaw’s Business Policy course, Dean Gay’s second pedagogical experiment in 1912 involved the first-year course, Commercial Organization—which would be renamed Marketing two years later (Copeland M. T., 1954). Melvin Copeland was asked to teach a discussion-based section of Commercial Organization alongside a traditional lecture-based section of the course (used as a control group) and to deliver a problem-based midterm and final exam to both sections. This problem-based midterm, or “embryo cases,” as Copeland has called them (1954, p. 28), was comprised of short narrative
problems similar to Fredric Abbuhl’s early case scenarios in technical
communication and the PBL-based approach to cases in the sciences, as seen in Appendix B.
What is of note in Copeland’s embryo case is that this problem has been written as a hypothetical, which is a hallmark of the problem method: they present scenarios that are not required to have any fidelity to an historical
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but they remain proto- or embryo cases for the HBS administration because they are one step removed from any historical record of American business, just as case scenarios and hypothetical cases in business communication. However, the goal of these cases remains the same as the real-life cases that would become the hallmark of the HBS case method approach: they are more concerned with
approaches to decision making and problem solving than they are with any actual written or oral analysis of the cases' problems. As President Lowell would later opine in the 1930s, "The great art in life lies less in solving problems than in finding the problems to be solved,” which is what this pedagogy was meant to teach (Copeland M. T., 1954, p. 164). Not only was communication a secondary goal to this pedagogy, but so was finding an actual solution to the problem. To many educators, this might sound like a radical curriculum goal, especially in light of the modern statistics-governed field of business that we often encounter in the academy today.
As Copeland has written, “oral and written communication” and “dealing with people” certainly were two of the top four objectives of the founding
curriculum at HBS, but they were decidedly trumped by “analyzing business situations” and “the ability to organize” (1958, pp. 124-125). For the field of business communication, this poses a crucial question that must be answered before simply importing the case method approach: is the case method tailor-
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made for analysis and organization, or can it be refigured so that the production of written or oral communication is its main goal? In the HBS curriculum,
writing was simply one mediation of problem solving and analysis that HBS relied on among others, and it only gained any significant importance as
industry executives began complaining about recent HBS graduates’ inability to communicate effectively in writing. As Copeland notes:
employers would accept no alibi. They would not permit the School to throw the blame for faulty training in English back on the colleges or the homes of the students; they took the position that when the School
granted a man a degree, it placed its stamp of approval on him, including his use of the English language. (1954, p. 49)
So in 1914, in what Copeland calls the most important development in relation to written composition at HBS, the faculty voted to teach business writing to all first-year students. These students were to produce written reports on case problems every two weeks, which would then be read and critiqued by two faculty members: the instructor and a supplemental English instructor (Copeland M. T., 1958). This development led to the dominance of the case write- up as the primary type of case product produced in the case method approach.
Over the remaining seven years of Dean Gay’s administration, case study pedagogy grew very slowly; however, the heavy emphasis put on written
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composition continued during his tenure. With living cases and embryo cases, graduate students were required to write reports and short assignments in conjunction with their classroom discussions, and second-year students were required to complete a short master’s thesis on a current business problem. Initially, the thesis component was of questionable value because the research had not been produced to allow students to make a reasonably informed
argument (Copeland M. T., 1958). But another critique of the thesis arose: faculty reported that it was too time consuming to oversee the composition process for their students; as such, it became quite a “heavy burden” (Copeland M. T., 1958, p. 48).
When Wallace Donham took over the deanship in 1919, he continued this emphasis on business communication, while also making a drastic push to develop a case study pedagogy that was germane to business administration. Under Dean Donham’s direction, the Bureau of Business Research began systematically collecting data for case studies, the first business casebook was produced, a case writing course was instituted, and the case method became more fully formed. As a fellow graduate of the Law School, along with Dean Gay and others, Dean Donham was an “enthusiastic believer in the case method of instruction,” (Copeland M. T., 1954, p. 30). Importantly, Donham was not simply an administrator who had worked his way up through the faculty ranks; he had
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an illustrious career as a corporate lawyer-turned vice-president of the Old Colony Trust Company in Boston and as a receiver for the Bay State Street Railway Company (Copeland M. T., 1958). This experience shaped the way that he approached curriculum development and administrative decision making at HBS, in ways that were both shrewder and more tied to the public than Dean Gay – who admittedly possessed no business experience at all.