288 15 Case Studies Mary S. Morgan 1. ‘Case Studies’ in the Social Sciences: Epistemic Genres and Defnitional Issues Many different ‘styles’ or modes of scientifc reasoning can be found amongst the social sciences, including statistical, experimental, taxonomic, even mathematical modelling, but what is particularly symptomatic of social sci- ence research is a strong tradition of case study work. Case studies are used in the social sciences to varying degrees and with various status levels. They appear regularly in sociology, political science, and in those management felds based on sociology, anthropology, and psychology. In contrast, in eco- nomics, case studies do not command the high status of research work using either mathematical models or statistics. But lest one think that case studies are limited to the social science domains, it is worth a reminder that they are also found in medical sciences such as neurology, and may be understood to have cousins in the feld studies of ecology, the model organisms of biology, and the exemplary narratives of the humanities. The authority of science—and the legitimacy of scientifc knowledge when it travels beyond the immediate base of its production—rests not narrowly on methods, or means of investigation, but more broadly upon ways of rea- soning that work in conjunction with those means of investigation. The his- torian Alistair Crombie (1994), in writing his monumental account of the history of science in the Western traditions, wrote of these as ‘styles of think- ing’, defning them in the order that they were developed from ancient times: • mathematical postulation and proof • experiment • analogical or hypothetical modelling