Dimensión Situación de Comunicación

Hypothetical, or fictional, cases are by far the most common form of teaching cases in business communication, and for good reason. Hypothetical cases can give the appearance that the information was gathered from a real company while simplifying the most time-consuming part of case composition for instructors: the relationship building and research gathering necessary when working with real businesses. As a result, hypothetical cases are usually shorter than case method cases or research cases that use data from real corporations, but they also provide more information and context to the student than case scenarios. When most business communication scholars refer to using the case method in their pedagogical approach, what they are really referring to are

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hypothetical cases, which are a direct descendent from the HBS case method tradition (where they are referred to as armchair cases), but they are not quite the same (Culliton, 1954).

Organizationally, the form of a hypothetical case can be often quite simple due to its brevity and lack of elaborate detail. In the instance of the ABC’s

Casebook Project, the student writer receives a short background narrative on her role in the company, which is presented alongside the communication dilemma that grounds the case. Cases can also provide several assignments to choose from (or the instructor might ask students to work through each

assignment in stages). In the Casebook Project, Barbara Shwom, Penny Hirsch, and Judith Messick’s (1998) fictional case about the Davis-Martin PR firm places the student as an assistant account executive, an account executive, or an

assistant (depending on the assignment you complete at the end of the case) at a fictional public relations firm working closely with a state Chamber of

Commerce organization.

This three-part organizational scheme (background, problem, task) takes different forms, as we can see in Roger Munger’s Document-Based Cases for Technical Writing. Munger’s case begins with a brief background, but then

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challenge. Only after this explanation does the student receive a series of tasks that build upon each other.

A large resource of business communication cases has been collected through the Association for Business Communication’s 1998 Casebook Project, which was edited by Pricilla Rogers and Jone Rymer and refereed by the national Case Editorial Review Board. These types of teaching cases range anywhere from one page to 15 pages in length, depending on whether they contain a longer narrative or sample documents for the students to read through. As Munger has defined them, a hypothetical teaching case is simply a detailed narrative from the workplace complete with, “characters, dialogue, and props in the form of sample documents” (2005, p. v). However, in their introduction to the Casebook Project, Rogers and Rymer provided a more detailed definition to anchor our

understanding of what differentiates a hypothetical case from other teaching case styles:

they provide a slice of business life inside the classroom. Cases are just that—instances of business experience. The case creates a realistic

situation for all members of a class to experience the events in a company, enabling everyone to participate in both learning about and practicing business/management communication. A case provides the social

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and it furnishes the audience with a specific situation, a business setting, and a role for learners to perform as communicators in ways that more nearly represent writing and speaking

in the workplace them most classroom-based pedagogies. (Rogers & Rymer, 1998, p. 8; emphasis original)

As Rogers and Rymer have put it, hypothetical cases are realistic situations that allow us to experience an issue in a context that functions representationally as a real-life encounter with speaking and writing in the workplace.

This claim of case study pedagogy’s utility, its representation of realism and complexity in the professional workplace, is one of the most frequently voiced arguments for the use of teaching cases in business communication over 30 years of scholarship (see, for instance, Hays, 1976; Tedlock, 1981; Barton & Barton, 1981; Gunn and Mitchell, 1982; Moore, 1987; Stevens, 1996; Zhao, 1996; Hildebrand, 1997; Rogers and Rymer, 1998). Throughout this literature, this argument is presented in varying ways that locate this utility in different

components of the teaching case. For instance, Robert Hays (1976) has presented this argument in more vague terms, claiming that teaching cases stimulate, “interest through realism,” because of the presentation of the narrative to its audience. Ben and Marthalee Barton (1981), on the other hand, have claimed that case studies provide realism by showing students what the role of a professional

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engineer actually involves in the workplace. In addition to properly representing professional roles, cases correct the fact that students “misconstrue the general nature of technical communication itself,” they wrote (Barton & Barton, 1981, p. 23). Students are unaware that communication is a transactional process,

according to Barton and Barton, and case studies help them understand that communication in the real world is not something that happens after solutions are found for problems. Instead, communication is constitutive of the decision- making process itself.

The difference between Hays’s and Barton and Barton’s arguments is one of locating the realism in teaching cases in its form, its task, or in a process of

doing that replicates a workplace activity. For some scholars, like Hays, the utility of realism might be found in how the narrative form makes the case appear as if

it had happened in real life, which pulls the reader’s interest into the story. For Rogers and Rymer, this narrative aspect goes beyond the presentation of detail and involves putting the student in a realistic role that mimics a task they might perform in the workplace. But for Barton and Barton, the process of

communicating with others to make decisions and achieve desired ends is the real utility of employing cases in our curriculum.

When arguments for the realism of hypothetical cases hinge on the format of the case itself, they are open to an oft-cited critique that has been around since

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the 1950s, at least. In the early HBS scholarship on teaching cases, instructors warned against the use of armchair cases, or hypothetical cases, because they lacked a sufficient attachment to reality. As James Culliton, an early case writer at HBS, noted:

At times when the case collection process does not unearth the kind of business problem which a professor has been seeking, a research assistant may be tempted to write a case which is a composite of several different real situations. Such cases (known at the Business School as armchair cases) should be used with caution. They are among the most difficult to write because the absence of outside facts against which they can be

checked may lead to inconsistencies within the case and to the inclusion of unreal and unrealistic business problems. The use, and especially the excessive use, of armchair cases may defeat one of the prime purposes of the case system, which is not to illustrate theories but to force professors and students alike to face real business facts. (Culliton, 1954, p. 268) For Culliton, artificiality causes the substitution of patterned theory for a face-to- face encounter with real business facts from which we can then extrapolate concepts to guide our actions. In other words, Culliton negates the deductive

empirical approach that many business communication case pedagogues espouse

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inductive empiricism that lies at the heart of the HBS case method. Instead of having students apply a theory or principle to the case’s situation, using it as a proving ground for applicability, the inductive model uses the case as the raw material from which students will discover those theories or principles.

This same critique of artificiality was echoed in business communication during the 1980s when Marilyn Butler critiqued these “abbreviated” and “open- ended” problems for failing to provide anything but a “superficial identification with the persona they must assume, much less with the given circumstances and audiences” (1985, p. 4). This artificiality, which she argues is inherent to both ficational and real-life teaching cases (no matter how well-wrought the real-life case intends to be), encourages over-simplification, shallow responses, and formulaic approaches to problem solving. To resolve this problem of artifice, Butler recommends live cases that put the student in direct contact with a company or a professional.

One important point to note here is that, in the existing literature, these critiques of artificiality do not dissappear when we shift the argument for realism away from the form or the task of the teaching case and relocate it to the process of doing that students experience by working through a case. As both Bruce Gunn and Ivor Mitchell (1982) and Robert Hays (1976) have argued, since cases rely on learning by doing, they are best used to impart process-oriented skills to students

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that they will need in the workplace. However, more recent arguments have critiqued this argument about skills transfer for failing to reproduce the “authentic contexts” (Kain & Wardle, 2005, p. 114) and “dynamic contexts” (Kohn, 2015, p. 169) of the workplace. According to Liberty Kohn, even the

“adundance of case study documents and scenarios” meant to reproduce the real world cannot replicate the dynamic context of the workplace, and this creates a transference problem when “exporting problem-solving and writing strategies from education to the workplace” (2015, p. 169).