https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492617715522 https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492617715522 Journal of Management Inquiry 1–6 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1056492617715522 jmi.sagepub.com https://doi.org/10.1177/1056492617715522 Journal of Management Inquiry 1–6 © The Author(s) 2017 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1056492617715522 journals.sagepub.com/home/jmi Article I am sitting in a friend’s office in Berkeley, just prior to deliv- ering a lecture. The topic of my lecture is nostalgia, an emo- tion that I cannot help but experience as I am revisiting my alma mater. I pick up a book from his library more or less at random, and am interested to notice that the book refers to the case of Victor, the wild child of Aveyron, a 12-year-old boy who was discovered in the wild, ostensibly brought up by wolves, and untainted by the benefits and burdens of human culture. This is a case that has long interested me. But my fascina- tion with the book increases dramatically when I notice on the book’s first page the signature of Herbert Blumer, the book’s original owner. In 1975, as a PhD student at Berkeley, I had had a few contacts with Blumer, an impressive figure in American sociology whose symbolic interactionism had fallen behind the then more fashionable and radical trends. Perusing the book prompted some thoughts on case stud- ies and their uses in social science and management research. It prompted me to reflect on what attracts scientific interest to a case study and some of the strengths and limitations of the cases we use as researchers and also as teachers. In par- ticular, it prompted me to reflect on some of the similarities and differences between case studies and stories, both of which are types of narrative even if they are governed by dif- ferent rules of narration and different narrative contracts between authors and audiences. Both case studies and stories are capable of yielding considerable insights within the framework of a narrative methodology; in the hands of skilled instructors, they can be powerful instruments for dis- seminating knowledge. This essay, however, argues that where storytellers enjoy considerable poetic licence to dis- tort facts for effect, factual accuracy remains a vital con- straint for researchers who seek to make use of case studies to develop knowledge. Victor was the most famous of several “feral children,” children who were found living in the wild, with no human contact or care. He was discovered in the French region of Aveyron in 1798, a mere 9 years after the French Revolution. He was virtually naked, making wolf-like noises, walking on all fours and apparently having no sense of hot or cold. He quickly generated an interest in the scientific community “as a case,” a human animal that had missed out on what phi- losopher Louis Althusser (1971) once called the “long forced march of becoming human.” Victor was “adopted” by French physician Jean Marc Gaspar Itard who, over a period of 5 years, studied his behav- ior and conducted a number of experiments with him. This is all described in a detailed report that Itard (1801/2009) com- piled for the Government. This was the centrepiece of Herbert Blumer’s book and formed the basis for a subsequent 715522JMI XX X 10.1177/1056492617715522Journal of Management InquiryGabriel research-article 2017 1 University of Bath, UK 2 Lund University, Sweden Corresponding Author: Yiannis Gabriel, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath BA2 7AY, UK. Email: y.gabriel@bath.ac.uk Case Studies as Narratives: Reflections Prompted by the Case of Victor, the Wild Child of Aveyron Yiannis Gabriel 1,2 Abstract Drawing on a celebrated case study of a feral child in France, the author argues that there are similarities between stories and case studies as types of narrative and that they are both capable of acting as insightful tools of management inquiry. Both case studies and stories call for narrative imagination to develop meaningful narratives. Serendipity, the accidental discovery of meaning or purpose in what seems random and purposeless, is an important part of narrative imagination. As meaningful narratives, both case studies and stories follow a structure of interwoven actions and events with beginnings, middles, and ends. However, where storytellers enjoy poetic license to distort facts for effect, case study researchers are more constrained by factual accuracy. The beginnings and ends of case studies are not as clearly defined as those of stories and fictional narratives. Keywords case study, story, management learning, narrative, feral children, serendipity, narrative imagination, affordance theory