ABSTRACT
Other professions besides health also use the discourse of cases – in particular, law and business. Indeed, the Harvard Business School (HBS) was one of the pioneers of what the HBS faculty called the case method. Th e method was adopted by the HBS in 1920, just over a decade aft er the school’s foundation, and is still in use there today. In the context of the case method, a case was defi ned by the HBS in 1975 as a description of a management situation. Th e cases can be up to 25 pages long (much longer than those used in health professional education) and are ‘not written to illustrate correct or incorrect handling of an administrative situation, nor is there an editorial bias that implies a particular conclusion.’1(p947) However, the success of the HBS was not repeated by the Harvard Graduate School of Education, which failed to introduce the case method into its programmes in the 1920s due to lack of resources, failure to articulate the conceptual orientation of the approach and its underlying philosophy, and case writing not being seen as a legitimate use of faculty time.1
