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HOW TO WRITE A CASE STUDY by Charles Warner
There are two types of case studies: (1) factual ones depicting real organizations, people, and situations and (2) fictional ones that, although usually based loosely on actual people and events, do not use real organization's or people's names.
The advantages of factual case studies are that they can provide a wealth of detail, give credibility to situations and problems, and, most important, provide real outcomes. Actual results give those who analyze a case real-world solutions: How did the organization or manager solve the problems? Did the solutions work?
Although factual cases furnish concrete, not theoretical, solutions, they also have some drawbacks. Often students or case discussants get hung up debating the details of the case as they may remember them. Some discussants claim inside information or refer to later outcomes that bring the organization's solutions into question. When discussing factual cases, analysts tend to focus on the accuracy of the details rather than on the appropriateness of the solutions.
Factual cases tend to become outdated as organizations, strategies, problems, and people change over time. Also, if a factual case portrays real organizations or people in a negative way, questions of taste, fairness, and even libel can arise. Finally, in a factual case writers must obviously stick to the facts, which means that they are limited to dealing with only those management topics that are implicit in the case.
The most effective use of factual cases are for describing current organizational problems, then analyzing and attempting to solve the problems using a consultative approach.
Fictional cases have the drawback that students can never know if a solution worked or not.
Fictional cases