Mythologizing Management: A Mythographic Analysis of the Case Method

The case method to this day is a generally accepted didactical tool in business schools around the world. Based on the casuistry approach in legal studies developed at Harvard Law School, it was adapted and popularized for business studies by the Harvard Business School in the early twentieth century. While case studies have since been a cornerstone of business education, their epistemological status has always been frail and precarious. As Khurana (2007) notes, they served an important role in the social legitimization of the management profession, but never entirely lived up to the objectivist pretentions this professionalization was meant to foster. In the heyday of managerial capitalism up until the early eighties of the last century they reflected a knowledge ideal that leaned heavily on a rhetorical dispositive to buttress the power of CEOs as ‘sovereign’ corporate statesmen in large and diversified US firms. After the dissolution of managerialism through the rise of the neoliberal shareholder perspective on business (agency theory and transaction cost economics) one would have expected case studies to have become less prominent vehicles of management ideology, but it seems the opposite has actually happened (cf. Ghoshal, 2005). More than providing real-life, albeit highly cultivated and staged playgrounds for the application of business knowledge, it is our contention in this paper, that the narrative ‘essence’ of case studies is that they exemplify hyper-real (Baudrillard 1988, pp. 166–184), larger-than-life incantations of business success promising the resolution of any administrative problem for those prepared to immerse themselves into the mode of managerial or entrepreneurial action. Quite literally they can therefore be seen as secular-economic songs of praise, eschatological stories of salvation, like psalms celebrating and glorifying the courage and determination of people overcoming their fear, indecision or disgruntlement in the face of business or organizational adversity. Otherwise stated, they are myths. It is not our aim in this paper to simply focus on the truthfulness of myths, as management scholars tend to do (cf. Kieser, 1997) and ‘disqualify’ them as falsehoods or as proto-scientific belief systems that need to be discarded and replaced by more rational approaches to management. Neither do we want to propose the feasibility of a “myth of mythlessness” (Doty, 2000, p. 417). Though we largely agree with the criticisms leveled against business case studies as being heavily skewed in favor of the managerial point of view (Chetkovich & Kirp, 2001; Collinson & Tourish, 2015, p. 590) and mostly constituting post-hoc rationalizations of perceived success, embodying “sanitized versions of corporate (and CEO) heroism”, (McDonald, 2017, ch. 32) that allow the business school to operate as a “capitalist madrassa” (McDonald, 2017, ch. 32, paraphrasing J.-C. Spender), our purpose will be to identify the peculiar ‘rhetorical economy’ (Agamben, 2011) responsible for the ideological efficacy of business case studies in the mythologization of management. In order to do so, we will perform a mythographic analysis of the case method using Barthes’ semiotic theory of myths as a starting point (Barthes, 1972 [1957]; see also Chandler, 2017, pp. 171–174). Barthes takes myths to be second-order semiological systems that employ manifestly meaningful first-order signs (images or texts) as signifiers of a meta-level sign, produc-ing a latent ideological signification that deforms and distorts the meaning of the original. Thus a picture of a young black soldier saluting the French tricolor can be used as a meta-level signifier for French colonial imperiality that invades, empties out and alters the meaning of the original picture. In this sense, according to Barthes, the linguistic object-signs in myths are inherently ambiguous: meaningful and formal, full and empty, exemplary and expendable, concrete and immaterial (they could be replaced by a myriad of other signifiers) at the same time. Similarly, the way business cases portray the ‘life stories’ of the protagonist(s) in their engagement with a business challenge is never about the idiosyncrasies of the case situation itself. The mythical scheme of the business case refers to an economy beyond the reality depicted. Barthes (1972 [1957], pp. 127–130) indicates that the decipherment of myths can take three different forms: 1) a cynical reading exposing the intentionality of the mythical example (from the perspective of the myth-maker), 2) a demystifying reading unmasking the alibi behind the form of the myth (the perspective of the myth-breaker), and 3) an ideological reading explaining the way in which myth naturalizes a contingent historical occurrence and renders it unquestionable (in the eyes of the myth-consumer). From the latter perspective, a mythographic analysis focuses on the dynamic of meaning and form that gives myth its seductive immediacy. As Barthes notes: “myth essentially aims at causing an immediate impression – it does not matter if one is later allowed to see through the myth, its action is assumed to be stronger than the rational explanations which may later belie it” (Barthes, 1972 [1957], p. 129). We will perform our analysis of the way in which this immediate capture is accomplished in business cases using two illustrative examples. One concerns the establishment of Ashesi University in Ghana by Patrick Awuah (Harrington, 2008), the other is about the leadership philosophy of Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco (Maddux, Williams, Swaab, & Betania, 2014). Both cases fall into the category of ‘life stories’, interlaced with information about the organizations the founders have created and applicable management knowledge they ‘invested’ in them. As we intend to show, the salvific qualities of management myths mentioned above are clearly present in these studies, particularly in the way in which the mythical narrative miraculously bridges the abyss between general business knowledge and situated managerial action (between being and praxis) through a ‘providential machinery’ (Agamben, 2011) that ultimately ensures the efficacy of the protagonists’ plans and decisions. What the protagonists ‘know’ somehow cannot fail to translate into the (almost instantaneous) success of their ‘actions’. It is the working of this providential ‘invisible hand’ that we will try to lay bare in the rhetorical arrangement of both cases, which accounts for the ideological appeal such cases to this day still have in the business school classroom.