Narrative Case Study Research Articles

Life on heels and making deals

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to discuss issues related to entrepreneurial undertakings of women in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) with the purpose of contributing to the development of context-dependent knowledge of entrepreneurship. Focussing on the life narratives of two expatriate female business-owners who created a common enterprise, the case permits to uncover and critically assess the different stages of the entrepreneurial process in a unique cultural setting.Design/methodology/approach– The authors employed a narrative case study approach to allow for a rich contextual information to emerge from the detailed accounts of individual lives and entrepreneurial experiences of case protagonists. Data were gathered from multiple sources (e.g. interviews, e-mail exchanges, web sites) and subsequently analyzed and coded into prevalent themes by two researchers and one assistant independently, permitting to achieve both data and investigator triangulation.Findings– This case elucidates the entrepreneurial journey of two female expatriates who launched their individual businesses and joined efforts in the establishment of Heels and Deals (H & D), a network that helps UAE-based women-entrepreneurs reach their professional aspirations within a patriarchal society. The cofounders are now at a cross-roads where they have to make a choice between running their own businesses to secure their sustainability and focussing on H & D to lead its international expansion. The narratives of the case protagonists allow contrasting the discovery and creation views of entrepreneurship and examining the role of leadership skills and personality characteristics in entrepreneurial success.Originality/value– Despite an increasing number of businesswomen in the UAE, little is known about the way they approach the complex entrepreneurial process and deal with challenges and opportunities faced on the road. The case bridges this gap by offering the possibility to reflect on how expatriate female entrepreneurs in a Middle-Eastern context balance multiple trade-offs to succeed in their business-related endeavors.

Introduction to Case Study Special Issue-- Case Studies in Japan: Two Methods, Two Worldviews

This issue of PCSP presents two case studies in Japan, commentaries from four prominent psychologists representing various research backgrounds, and the responses to the commentaries by the two authors. Japanese clinical psychology has historically emphasized the central role of the case study in psychotherapy and the inseparability of it from practice, research, and training. There is a plethora of case studies published in academic journals of clinical psychology and many practicing psychologists are engaged in case study activities as a part of their professional development as a result. However, this centrality of focus has not led to the examination of methodological issues associated with case studies. What constitutes a good case study or what kinds of evidence are necessary for a valid inference in case study research are both largely untouched topics. The wide variety of case studies in Japanese psychology form a continuum from one pole consisting of the traditional narrative case study to the other, consisting of a scientifically precise single case design to objectively track the change in targeted symptoms. In this issue, we present two outstanding examples of each type of case study. While different in type, each of the two case studies presented in this issue represents a model of how systematic and rigorous case studies can be conducted and documented as a form of psychotherapy research. We provide these two models (a) to encourage more case studies that meet these methodological standards, and (b) to promote the discussion on differing case study methodologies.

The limits of role modeling as a basis for critical multicultural education: the case of Black male teachers in urban schools

This article provides a critical analysis of the political significance of role modelling as it relates to envisaging a critical multicultural approach to educational reform. While not rejecting role modelling outright, it calls for a commitment to questioning the limits of common sense understandings that underpin the logic of gender and racial affiliation and homogeneity upon which it is based. The focus is on Black male teachers, given the attention that has been paid to their role in field of boys’ and multicultural education. The article draws on theoretical and intersectional frameworks that raise some epistemological concerns about the logics of racial and gender affiliation that lie at the heart of role modelling discourses. While stressing the limitations of role modelling as a basis for a critical multicultural pedagogic reform project, particularly as it pertains to the role of Black male teachers in the schooling of disadvantaged Black male students, it does not reject the political and transformative potentialities of their embodied presence in urban schools. By drawing on case study narrative accounts of two Black male teachers, the article presents an intersectional analysis that attends to the organizational, intersubjective, representational and experiential dimensions of race, gender and sexuality that are implicated in these men’s everyday understandings of their pedagogical actions and identities in particular urban school contexts in Toronto. While pointing to the limits of role modelling, the cases are employed to draw attention to the crucial significance of the embodied presence of these Black male’ teachers as transformative intellectuals with regards to their self-reflexive articulated activism in the urban school classroom. The article concludes with an exhortation to rejecting the master narratives of racial and gender homogeneity that lie at the heart of a politics of role modeling, but does not reject the political significance of and need for the representation of Black male teachers in urban schools.

The Character of the Entrepreneurial University

How are entrepreneurial universities initially formed and how do they sustain themselves? In Creating Entrepreneurial Universities (Pergamon-Elsevier, 1998), I traced developments in a few European universities from 1980 to 1995 to determine how they had gone about significantly changing the way they operated—how they moved to a much more proactive style. I argued that five pathways of transformation could be induced from these cases: diversified funding base; strengthened steering core; expanded developmental periphery; stimulated academic heartland; and integrated entrepreneurial culture. More recently, my latest book, Sustaining Change in Universities: Continuities in Case Studies and Concepts (Open University Press, 2004), substantially expands on that earlier analysis and provides a further look at the evolving character of the entrepreneurial university. In the new book I searched for exemplars of entrepreneurial action—and stronger conceptualization. I turned to 14 internationally distributed case studies to clarify anew the earlier stated pathways of transformation and, further, to suggest dynamics that produce a new steady state committed to ongoing change. Five narratives pursue sustaining developments during the late 1990s in the European universities previously studied: the University of Warwick in England, the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, the University of Twente in the Netherlands, the University of Joensuu in Finland, and Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. Three new accounts, drawn from the work of other scholars, portray transformed universities in Africa (University of Makerere in Uganda), Latin America (Catholic University of Chile), and Australia (Monash University). Additional brief narratives report on six diverse research universities in the United States (two private, four public), which exemplify aggressive institution building under the spur of intense competition—Stanford and MIT, Michigan and UCLA, North Carolina State University and Georgia Institute of Technology. The newly highlighted dynamics of change stress, first, mutually supportive interaction among transforming elements; second, a newly established forward-looking “perpetual momentum”; and, third, behind the scenes, an institutionalized volition, a collective will, stimulates and guides a self-sustaining and self-selecting forcefulness in responding to societal demands. In one case after another, we find an assertive “bureaucracy of change”: such professional staff as development officers, grants and contracts officers, and continuing education officers—nonacademic personnel who are much more forward-oriented than the traditional “administrative” staff who served on behalf of the funding public authority and higher regulatory boards and councils. We see the overall sustaining capacity become a virtual steady state of change, a character not dependent on a commanding CEO or a brilliant management team. Change becomes a habit, an institutionalized state of being. Since each university is unique in combining common elements with particular features, the case studies produce “amplifying variations” of the overall themes. Chalmers, in Sweden, illuminates particularly well how to generate centers of initiative in a small to medium-size university; the Catholic University of Chile dramatizes how to modernize an old-fashioned faculty in a decade and a half; the University of Michigan reveals how a massive public university, busily multiplying resources, can match up against the sharp competition of the richest private universities in the world. The exhibited variations are as much a source of transferable insight as the old and new concepts that bring formal order to wide-ranging empirical examination of very complex entities. Case study narratives additionally weave uniquenesses around common elements and their amplifying variations. There is, finally, only one MIT, one Twente, one Monash.

The New Woman: Sexology, Literary Modernism, and the Trans Feminine Remainder

This article begins by tracing the figure of gender inversion from Karl Heinrich Ulrichs's mid-nineteenth-century celebration of the “woman's soul confined in a man's body” to Edward Carpenter's early twentieth-century disavowal of the effeminate “of the extreme type,” whose gender nonconformity confirms the normativity of the mass of “normal” masculine homosexuals. Carpenter's disavowal voices both an orientalist distaste for the “mincing effeminacy” of British colonial subjects and an affirmation of the “somewhat masculine” women who are pursuing their rights in “civilized nations.” This article argues that this freighted figure of inversion obscures the theories of embodiment found in sexological case studies themselves, which ground the experience of sex in sociality and sensation. The sexological invert provides the foundation for a trans feminine stock character that modernist novels install to represent the cultural redefinition of “woman” and “man” in the early twentieth century. Aldous Huxley's Farcical History of Richard Greenow is an orienting example of this tendency. Jean Genet's Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, in contrast, reflects a modernist current grounded in queer and trans street culture. The novel's heroine, the queen Divine, recalls the theories of embodiment outlined in the case study narratives. Ultimately, the “New Woman” demonstrates that sexology provides the narrative template for the twentieth-century medical diagnostic for transsexuality. From the early twentieth century, novels disseminate this abstract and singular definition of transsexuality and also recover the various and complex narratives of sexed embodiment first found in the case studies.

Mentoring for women starting a PhD: a “free zone” into academic identity

Purpose – Despite increasing numbers of women attaining higher levels in academic degrees, gender disparities remain in higher education and among university faculty. Authors have posited that this may stem from inadequate academic identity development of women at the doctoral level. While gender differences may be explained by multiple and variable factors, mentoring has been proposed as a viable means to promote academic identity development and address these gender gaps. A “StartingDoc program” was launched and supported by four universities in French-speaking Switzerland. The purpose of this paper is to report the experience of one of the six “many-to-one” mentoring groups involved in the StartingDoc program in 2012-2013. Design/methodology/approach – This study is based on the description of a group experience within a university-based mentoring scheme offered to women entering in their PhD program in French-speaking Switzerland. It is examined using a qualitative, narrative case study design. Findings – Themes from the narrative analysis included the four dimensions of the Clutterbuck model of mentoring (guiding, coaching, counselling, networking), as well as an additional five emerging themes: first expectations, process, sharing, building identity, and unmet expectations. The qualitative analyses suggest that mentoring can be an effective tool in supporting professional identity development among female doctoral students. However, further work is needed to elucidate the most effective strategies for developing and retaining women in academia. Originality/value – While a many-to-one mentoring group has been theorized and is recognized as an effective means of supporting doctoral experience, its implementation in French-speaking Switzerland is in its infancy. This study provides insights into the value of such a mentoring scheme dedicated to women at the very beginning of their doctoral studies. Most notably it created opportunities for mentees to: discover aspects of academic life; break isolation; and develop some of the soft skills required to facilitate their doctoral journey.

A Personal–Professional Experience of Losing My Home to Wildfire: Linking Personal Experience with the Professional Literature

This article reports on the author’s personal–professional experience of losing a home to wildfire. The article is presented as a self-conducted narrative case study. The author used for narrative raw data 400,076 words from her blog-text that covered the period from the evening of the fire (June, 28, 2012) through 2 year and 3 months post-fire (September, 2014). Thirteen themes were selected based on frequency (>10 %, n = 7) and salience (n = 6). The results echo the extant literature on disaster recovery. The themes greater than 10 % included: the presence of and guilt induced by victim blaming; the overwhelming emotional and logistical aspects of property loss; concerns about both economic and financial issues; a need for understanding a “normal” recovery trajectory; interconnections of community and individual recovery; forced redefinition of the self and the importance of recognizing closure as elusive and multifaceted. Themes selected for salience included the importance of privacy; the difficulty of rapid schema development; lack of knowledge as to how to engage in ritual greetings; the negative effects of disclosure on others; the importance of having a federal disaster declaration; and that anniversary date anticipation exceeded the anniversary itself. The author concludes that resilience and psychological equilibrium are attainable, particularly with counselling and social support. The author also calls for more research on “normal” recovery, particularly process-oriented research that helps define the trajectory of individuals and families who struggle but survive disasters without significant post-disaster pathology.

Elite athletic career as a context for life design

Against a theoretical backdrop of narrative career construction, this article argues for the cultural constitution of life-designing processes in and through sport. A narrative case study approach is used to explore the culturally infused, gendered construction of elite athletic careers from the life story perspective. One Finnish, male, professional hockey player (age 29) and one Baltic, female, amateur orienteer (age 27) participated in a series of three individual interviews, generating approximately five interview hours per athlete. Both participants drew upon the performance narrative plot of an exemplary athletic career to make sense of their sporting experiences, life choices, and career behaviors. Further analysis of gendered career narrations in the context of participants' lives extended contextualized understandings of career practices, discursive resources and cultural constraints of the life design at a particular socio-historical juncture. The present study elucidates the complex social, cultural, and gendered underpinnings of athletic career, as well as the ways in which agentic individuals create novel meanings in bringing authenticity to their life through the athletic pursuit.

Workplace learning during the science doctorate: what influences research learning experiences and outcomes?

This multiple narrative case study examines the experiences of six science doctoral students from a workplace learning perspective. For each participant, the following were gathered over 2.5 years: biographic questionnaires, 6–10 activity logs of a week’s experiences, 2 pre-interview questionnaires, and 2 semi-structured interviews. Amongst the six student cases, three pairs who shared similar learning experiences and outcomes were identified and termed the: positive-professional, positive-academic, and challenging-uncertain pairs. Students’ learning was driven by needs which emerged from research work. Experiences and outcomes were influenced by varying affordances and hindrances in/with: research projects, supervision, colleagues, and individual choices. Findings show the inter-relationship between different elements related to individuals and context(s) in science doctoral work, and patterns in these inter-relationships. Findings emphasise the importance of attending to the research work students engage in, and the affordances available to them, to ensure effective learning which can support students’ learning and career goals.

Searching for an English self through writing

Most Finnish university students, just like the other new global elites (Kramsch,2013), use English without problems. Some students, however, struggle withEnglish to the extent that their studies suffer. One could say that they have adeeply “wounded” English self (Karlsson, 2013). My context of research andpractice is the Autonomous Learning Modules (ALMS) at Helsinki UniversityLanguage Centre. In my work as a language counsellor and practitioner-researcher,pedagogical concerns are always primary, and there is a need to appreciatediversity yet notice every student’s unique experiences. The broadbackground of my recent work is English as part of the identity of young academicFinns. In particular, I have been interested in how students with a“wounded” English self can develop new identity positions, and in how a languagecounsellor can help them in this process. In this paper, my focus is on thesubtle practical interconnections between learner autonomy, learner diversity,and learner identity as they emerge in a diary written by a student of Englishwith dyslexia and language (classroom) anxiety. A narrative case study of Mariiaillustrates how the counsellor’s appreciation and her own recognition of thecomplex ecological realities (Casanave, 2012) surrounding and interacting withher learning encourage and empower her. Mariia uses her freedom to controlher own learning (Huang & Benson, 2013) and makes choices from the manylifewide experiential learning opportunities in her life (Karlsson & Kjisik, 2011).Reflective writing in the learning diary helps her to construct a realistic vision ofherself as a learner and user of English, and she leaves the identity position ofa failure in the classroom and claims a new, more successful one (Norton, 2014).

What is individual in individualised instruction? Five storylines of meeting individual needs at school

The purpose of this narrative case study was to examine the meanings and practices of individualised instruction narrated by two seventh-grade Finnish pupils with mild learning difficulties, their mothers, their special education teacher and researchers. The data comprise narrative interviews and field notes. The analysis showed that the narrators had various, even conflicting, experiences of individualisation, which was narrated through five storylines: individual needs as difficulties and limitations; individualisation as the ideal principle for inclusive education; individualisation as a bureaucratic procedure; individualised instruction as making room for emotions, and individualised instruction as nothing special. These storylines constructed individualised education as an ideal and eligible pedagogical practice in principle but challenging to properly implement in practice.

Multiple Perspectives on Elementary Teachers’ Science Identities: A case study

This narrative case study examined the relationship between teacher identity and elementary science teaching. Teacher identity was described using a modification of Gee's framework incorporating three perspectives: the teachers’ self-described identity, the researchers’ view of teacher identity, and the students’ views of teacher identity. Over the course of one school year, we studied one class of second-grade students receiving science instruction from three different teachers. We found that each teacher had unique identity characteristics. Further, the three perspectives of teacher identity were sometimes in conflict with one another within individual teachers, emphasizing the importance of incorporating multiple perspectives in order to give a complete description of teacher identity. This study has meaningful implications for understanding the ways in which students’ perspectives can enrich our understanding of teacher identity.

Narratives of family transition during the first year post-head injury: perspectives of the non-injured members.

To explore the narratives created by non-injured family members in relation to themselves and their family in the first year after head injury. A head injury is a potentially devastating injury. The family responds to this injury by supporting the individual and their recovery. While the perspective of individual family members has been well documented, there is growing interest in how the family as a whole makes sense of their experiences and how these experiences change over time. Longitudinal narrative case study using unstructured in-depth interviews. Data were collected during an 18-month period (August 2009-December 2010). Nine non-injured family members from three families were recruited from an acute neurosurgical ward and individual narrative interviews were held at one, three and 12 months postinjury where participants were asked to talk about their experience of head injury. Analysis was completed on three levels: the individual; the family and between family cases with the aim of identifying a range of interwoven narrative threads. Five interwoven narratives were identified: trauma, recovery, autobiographical, suffering and family. The narrative approach emphasized that the year post-head injury was a turbulent time for families, who were active agents in the process of change. This study has shown the importance of listening to people's stories and understanding their journeys irrespective of the injured person's outcome. Change postinjury is not limited to the injured person: family members need help to understand that they too are changing as a result of their experiences.

Revealing Cultural Influences Through Cross-Cultural Teaching of Communication Models

This exploratory study argues that teaching a communication model in a cross-cultural situation can reveal cultural influences related to a model's assumptions and instructors' cultural biases as reflected in model teaching materials. Specifically, it presents a narrative case study based on observations gathered when teaching the U.S.-based Rhetoric of Social Intervention (RSI) model to Eastern European graduate students enrolled at a Czech university. Findings suggest that the RSI model provides a useful way of making sense of naming and social change in Eastern European cultures. They also indicate that culture might influence how users in another culture attend to the model. In addition, teaching the model in another culture revealed the possibility of a “perfection” goal underlying cultural ideologies. Finally, the findings highlight the cultural biases potentially inherent in U.S.-based teaching materials.

Living with Cancer Aged 75 and Older: A Biographical Narrative Case-Study

Aging is associated with greater incidence of disease and illness, including cancers. Extensive literature reports incidence, prevalence, and treatment of cancers in older individuals. The subjective perceptions of older individuals undergoing the experience of cancer remain largely unknown. The case-study reported in this article is derived from a larger study whose aim was to investigate the experiences of older people of living with cancer. Data were generated using narrative interviews with 20 individuals aged 76-87 diagnosed with one of four common cancers. Interview data were analysed using the concept of the “illness trajectory” (Corbin & Strauss, 1988). In this article I present a single narrative revealing a detailed and nuanced progression of events and reactions during the experience of cancer. The cancer story reported here is interpreted as a restitution narrative (Frank, 1995) in which the teller reports movement from an altered status (a damaged body) towards recovery and a return to “normal” (a body restored to health). Some features of this story show health care practitioners and services working effectively to provide treatment and care, but other elements of this individual narrative suggest that some outstanding challenges remain to provide the best care for elders with cancer.

Promoting resilience through adversity: increasing positive outcomes for expelled students

This article endeavours to increase educators’ understanding of the experiences of students who have been expelled from school in order to represent this critical stakeholder group in future policy development and programme implementation. Students’ perspectives are presented through thick description in this narrative case study. Findings indicate that expulsion from school can alter the trajectory of a student’s life – for better or for worse. Without thoughtful intervention from caring educators, this interruption in students’ education may have an irreparable destructive impact on students’ futures. Educators must develop interventions focused on bringing forth protective factors that are documented to increase resilience, thus making students less susceptible to the risks inherent in removing them from school.

‘Go over there and look at the pictures in the book’: an investigation of educational marginalisation, social interactions and achievement motivation in an alternative middle school setting

The middle years of school represent a time of educational turbulence, serving to marginalise some students from educational opportunities. Much research has focussed on individual cognitive factors influencing educational engagement, with less attention directed towards social interactions. Theoretically positioned within an expectancy–value model of achievement motivation, this study draws on the lived experience of a 12-year-old student within an alternative school in South Australia, Australia, to explore how social encounters may contribute to educational marginalisation. Findings from a narrative case study employing a semi-structured interview suggested that connections exist between social influences, such as interactions with teachers and peers, and subsequent achievement motivation. This study suggests that social interactions are critical determinants to an individual's educational engagement, affecting educational ability, expectancy and value beliefs.

Into the mountains and across the country: emergent forms of equine adventure leisure in Canada

This paper draws upon Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of ‘lines of flight’ to analyze the complex inter-relationship between people and their animals as enacted through adventure travel. Two narrative case studies illustrate how the human/horse relationship has been used to transform and/or escape from power relations. The first takes place during the early twentieth century with Mary Shaffer challenging Victorian gender and class relations through her exertions into what is now Jasper National Park in the Rocky Mountains of Canada. Similarly, second is the journey of Barbara Kingscote, who after the Second World War rode her horse from Quebec across Canada. Each case study constitutes an emergent form of adventure leisure that involves a companion species. In forging dialogic and material alliances based on a mutual ethics of caring, participants seek out ‘lines of flight’ from territorializing social forces and by doing so discover new territories in which to inhabit.

Hurricane Sandy and adaptation pathways in New York: Lessons from a first-responder city

Two central issues of climate change have become increasingly evident: Climate change will significantly affect cities; and rapid global urbanization will increase dramatically the number of individuals, amount of critical infrastructure, and means of economic production that are exposed and vulnerable to dynamic climate risks. Simultaneously, cities in many settings have begun to emerge as early adopters of climate change action strategies including greenhouse gas mitigation and adaptation. The objective of this paper is to examine and analyze how officials of one city – the City of New York – have integrated a flexible adaptation pathways approach into the municipality's climate action strategy. This approach has been connected with the City's ongoing response to Hurricane Sandy, which struck in the October 2012 and resulted in damages worth more than US$19 billion. A case study narrative methodology utilizing the Wise et al. conceptual framework (see this volume) is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the flexible adaptation pathways approach in New York City. The paper finds that Hurricane Sandy serves as a “tipping point” leading to transformative adaptation due to the explicit inclusion of increasing climate change risks in the rebuilding effort. The potential for transferability of the approach to cities varying in size and development stage is discussed, with elements useful across cities including the overall concept of flexible adaptation pathways, the inclusion of the full metropolitan region in the planning process, and the co-generation of climate-risk information by stakeholders and scientists.

Imag(in)ing Trans Partnerships: Collaborative Photography and Intimacy

In this article, I argue that collaborative photography offers dynamic potential for imag(in)ing trans intimate partnerships beyond the authority of textual representation. I present five photographic and narrative case studies, spanning a range of trans partnerships in the UK, to demonstrate some of the complex ways in which bodies, genders, sexualities, and time intersect in trans intimacy. I argue that the photographs create an imaginative resource, both for the people depicted in the photographs and for those viewing the photographs, providing new possibilities for thinking about trans partnerships, expanding the ways in which trans intimate partnerships are imag(in)ed, and opening up new spaces of possibility for gender and sexual identities.