Case Study Research: Science or a Literary Genre?

摘要

Despite the wide-spread utilization of the case study method in Information Systems (IS), some researchers are still puzzled by the question of “how can you generalize from a single case?” Some researchers believe that findings derived from a single case study have little basis for generalizability beyond the immediate context and, therefore, cannot be used for predicting events in other contexts. According to Imre Lakatos, one of the most prominent philosophers of science of modern times, the ability to predict novel facts is what distinguishes science from pseudoscience. Hence, our main objective with this paper is to reflect whether the findings derived from the case study method can be regarded as scientific or not.