Mythologizing Management through Metaphor in Business Teaching Cases

Harvard Business School refined and popularized the case method for business education in the early 20th century. It is increasingly used as a didactical tool in business schools around the world: the number of cases sold by HBS has increased from less than 6,5 million in 2002 to almost 18 million in 2023 (Harvard Business School, 2007, p. 27; 2024, p. 3).
However, the epistemological status of teaching cases has always been contentious. It is not uncommon to find CEOs lamenting the ill-preparedness of MBA graduates in the business press, calling for alternatives to the traditional case teaching method (cf. Gloeckler, 2008). Other criticisms leveled against business case studies are that they are heavily skewed in favor of the managerial point of view (Chetkovich & Kirp, 2001; Collinson & Tourish, 2015, p. 590) and mostly constitute post-hoc rationalizations of perceived success, embodying ‘sanitized versions of corporate (and CEO) heroism’, (McDonald, 2017, p. 280) that allow the business school to operate as a ‘capitalist madrassa’ (McDonald, 2017, p. 282, paraphrasing J.-C. Spender).
Initially, the justification for employing teaching cases was linked to the mid-century view of the manager as a bureaucrat, envisioning management as a quantifiable, technocratic skill. This skill was thought to be transferable through cases by highlighting management's formal and rational aspects and recommending suitable actions. However, with the decline of
managerialism and the emergence 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.
What, then, can account for the increased success of the case method within business schools? A possible answer to this question might be found in the more critical literature dealing with the aforementioned shift in management philosophy, which often draws on the register of myth. For instance, Fournier & Grey (2000) argue that in the past 30 to 40 years the manager has been recast as a ‘mythical’ (p. 12) figure, who relies on a nebulous set of leadership qualities and a certain charisma instead of a more technical skill set.
I investigate the mythology embedded in the Case Centre’s ten most popular teaching cases over the period 1973-2013 (The Case Centre, 2013). I do this by identifying and analyzing 1067 metaphors identified in the cases and their supplementary material – metaphor is considered to be a constitutive element of myth (cf. Christiansen, 1958; Sweetser, 1995).
Military metaphors and metaphors of aggression (e.g. ‘strategy’, ‘entrenched’, ‘battle’, ‘dawn raid’) form the biggest subgroup (374 entries), followed by spatial/geographical metaphors (e.g. ‘gap’, ‘to widen’, ‘peak’; 222 entries) and construction/engineering/technology metaphors (e.g. ‘to build’, ‘to launch’, ‘blue print’; 180 entries). In the cases, metaphors are used to varying ends. First, they naturalize contingent phenomena, typically by invoking some law of nature. Second, they confer legitimacy onto the field of business, mostly by referring to the exact sciences. Third, they communicate the risks and high stakes that come with leading a company, mainly by using words with a military origin. I conclude the paper by comparing the categories to those found in Lakoff & Johnson (1980) and Morgan (1986) and interpreting the results in light of the shift to shareholder capitalism.