Case studies – industry vs academia

Having worked at a consulting firm for a couple of years before coming to Grad School, it took me a while to shift my focus from industry case studies to those used for the purposes of academic research. In industry, more often than not, case studies tend to focus on a very narrow area of concern. Sometimes the purpose is to simply highlight a single project that was successfully completed, a single problem that was solved in an innovative way, or a single bid that was won despite huge competition. In these cases, there is no real need to be able to generalize as the case study is simply an example of an area of expertise. In these cases, there is no real need to be able to generalize. However, in academic research, I feel that there is always a need to be able to generalize at least to a certain extent. Even if the purpose of an academic research project is to describe one specific incident or phenomenon, I feel that it is necessary to give the reader the perception of how this explain certain correlation with other things surrounding the narrow focus of research – or at the least suggest how this specific research project can lead to future research in a broader generalized way. As such, I feel that case studies are in a way quite limiting. The discussion we had in class today during the group activity sort of proved this point. When considering research projects that cover broad issues like comparing Montessori schooling with public schools, or sustainable funding for Museums across Canada, or Twitter conversations between parents of children diagnosed with cancer – case studies did not seem to be fully applicable. We could perhaps compare the case of one Montessori School with one public school, or compare a dozen cases of Museum funding methods or perhaps twenty cases of Twitter accounts – but this seemed more like a combination of other methods like interviews, focus groups, or content analysis to be forcefully labeled as case studies. I guess it is important to know and understand when and how to combine mixed methods research with case studies, but whether it is really necessary – I’m still not sure.