A note on autobiography as a research method to use in MBA dissertation projects

A note on autobiography as a research method to use in MBA dissertation projects

One of my MBA students asked me whether he could use his own previous startup failure for a case study research for doing his dissertation project. My answer is that it cannot be a case study research because it is case history and not a contemporary phenomenon for investigation. This should become clear from the one of the features of case study research (Yin, 2018) that case study research focuses on contemporary events whereas history study does not. (note: a video on case study research).

The MBA student that raises his query could, instead, consider the research method of autobiography: "The autobiographical method refers to a specific form of research. Data collected within autobiographical research come from the own life experiences of the research and the author of the work" (source). To consider to use the research method of autobiography, the student needs to discuss the idea with his/her supervisor as the employment of autobiography research method in an MBA dissertation project is not common.

A historical study of a case is not suitable for usage  with the agile literature review approach (the consulting type) as it is not addressing a set of present management-concerns as owned by some of the managers of an organization and revealed in a management-concerns diagram.

As a side issue, it is acceptable to study a reported (past) case study (reported in a business journal) as a secondary research; in this case, the researcher might conduct a theory-driven analysis on the case study reported in a business journal (i.e. on the secondary data).

Reference

Yin, R. 2018. Case Study Research, Sage.