Grandon Gill is a Professor in the Information Systems and Decision Sciences department at the University of South Florida. He holds a doctorate in Management Information Systems from Harvard Business School, where he also received his M.B.A. His principal research areas are the impacts of complexity on decision-making and IS education, and he has published many articles describing how technologies and innovative pedagogies can be combined to increase the effectiveness of teaching across a broad range of IS topics. His most recent book, Informing Business: Research and Education on a Rugged Landscape, deals with how we might better align business academia with the complexity of business practice. Currently, he is Editor-in-Chief of Informing Science: The International Journal of an Emerging Transdiscipline and an Editor of the Journal of IT Education.
Dr. Gill, has also extensive experience in case method research, as well as in writing cases for classroom use and facilitating case discussions. His MBA and DBA are both from Harvard Business School, where the case method originated. He is also author of the book Informing with the Case Method (2011, Informing Science Press) and recently became the founding editor of Journal of Information Technology Education: Discussion Cases, a publication outlet for case studies in the MIS, IT and informing science fields.
Research can be characterized as an ongoing battle to understand the intrinsic complexity of the universe. For the past several hundred years, we have relied on two things to aid us in our skirmishes. The first is luck; sometimes it turns out that simple laws govern previously-mysterious behaviors, such as the motion of the planets or the relationship between electricity and magnetism. The second is increasing specialization; choosing problems and contexts sufficiently narrow so that they may prove solvable.
Although many academic researchers continue to hold out the possibility that the string of luck that has blessed our understanding of the physical sciences will continue with sufficient study, it is becoming increasingly evident that there are whole classes of problems whose intrinsic complexity will forever defy simple solutions. These problems are often important problems, problems involving social and technological systems that truly matter to people. The challenge presented by many of these systems is this: by decomposing them into component parts, we lose sight of the overall properties that are important to us.
A particularly common situation where complexity appears to evade the researcher’s ability to specialize occurs when multiple disciplines come into play. For example, a technology product (engineering) is introduced into the workforce (business) but is rejected by workers (psychology), a drug (chemistry) is employed to treat a condition (medicine) but elicits very different responses among patients (genetics?), an economic model (economics) is used as a basis for a policy (government) but leads to unexpected behaviors from certain groups (sociology), and so forth. For problems such as these, the challenge seems to be one of identifying better or best combinations, rather focusing on individual elements in isolation.
The case study provides an approach that can be applied to such problems. Cases are highly versatile, being equally well suited for research, for use in the classroom and for engaging research with practice. In addition, the types of situations where case studies are most appropriate tend to be precisely those complex situations where disciplines overlap. Thus, there are few research methodologies and teaching strategies that are more supportive of an interdisciplinary approach than the case method.
The workshop on interdisciplinary research, education and communication through case studies and methodologies will cover the following topics:
· The nature of complexity and the obstacles it presents
· Different types of case study: a taxonomy
· Cases in the classroom
· Interdisciplinary case research
· Case studies and practice
· Case writing
· The integrative view
The “integrative view” of case studies considers their use as a tool for linking together students, research and practice. Beyond that, they can be used to achieve understanding within diverse groups of: students (e.g., with different backgrounds), practitioners (e.g., businesses, labor, government) and researchers (e.g., from different disciplines). Following the presentation, participants will join in a discussion of case studies and alternative means of bringing disciplines together to better serve the needs of a complex world.
