This document discusses Stanley Fish's question "Is there a text in this class?" and examines the role of rhetoric in case analysis and different professional fields like law and business. Some key points: - Fish questioned whether a predefined text exists or if interpretation is shaped by institutional conventions. - Rhetoric plays an important role in law school by developing skills for civic participation, but its role is less understood in business schools which focus more on technical problem-solving. - The case method was developed in law schools where philosophy and rhetoric have remained important, unlike in business schools where a more technocratic approach is used. - Rhetoric's role in interpreting cases and developing solutions is often overlooked due to

1. Stanley Fish on the Case Method: Or, Is There A Case in This Class?
INTRODUCTION
Is there a case in this class? If yes, why? If not, why not? This is an interesting
problem of literary ontology that is of relevance in case analysis for several
reasons. Let me start with the reason that Stanley Fish popularized when he
asked quite seriously: ‘Is there a text in this class?’ in a book that he published with
this title (Fish, 1980). This was not just a rhetorical question given that Fish takes
rhetoric quite seriously - since, as he is fond of putting it, there is not much else
to be taken ‘seriously.’ This is especially the case if the structural relationship
between the ‘constative’ and ‘performative’ dimensions of a speech-act (Austin,
1975; Searle, 1965) and its relationship to institutional conventions of
interpretations have to be thought-through not only in the curriculum in
particular, but in society at large rather than an attempt to find out whether the
students have brought their assigned readings to the class on any given day
(Scholes, 1986). What this also means is that while everything in interpretation
may or not be reducible to persuasion (depending on your point of view), we
don’t have anything other than rhetoric to start with. In other words, rhetoric is
not just ‘imaginary’ in the psychoanalytic sense, but partakes of the ‘symbolic’ as
well (Lacan, 1968; Fink, 2004). It is something that goes into our theoretical
schemas in ways that we are still struggling to come to terms with in the theory
and practice of management as the growing literature on influence and ‘story-
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2. telling in organizations’ has just started to realize (Tietze et al, 2003; Hogan, 2005;
Broussard and Bell, 2005; Boje, 2008; Berman and Brown, 2005; Brown, et al, 2005;
Fog et al, 2005).
This is the case despite the fact that rhetoric has been an object of intense study in
not only the liberal arts, but in professional discourses as well. While the role of
rhetoric has been at least acknowledged in law and politics, there is not much
that has been said on this topic in business studies where the pre-occupation is
on technical approaches to problem-solving to the exclusion of linguistic and
discursive concerns (Caudill, 1992; Ragland-Sullivan, 1992). It is not widely
understood for instance that ‘routine appeals to problem-solving’ during a case
analysis or a case discussion itself have a rhetorical function in the context of
communication. It is, needless to say, easy to come to the wrong conclusion that
the study of rhetoric has no serious role to play in the context of a case analysis -
unless the case ostensibly belongs to areas taught under the rubric of
communication or persuasion (and therefore specifically emerges as a thematic
concern during a case analysis in these areas), or we are only dealing with sub-
units of grammar and language like ‘sentences’ though that is by no means Fish’s
position (Fish, 2011).
THE ROLE OF RHETORIC
The role that rhetoric, if deployed well, can play in setting the initial platform for
generating viable options and finding solutions is easily forgotten. It is not
widely understood that rhetoric does not always come into play after the criteria
of evaluation have been worked out, but is often a constitutive condition for
problem-solving itself. This can be inferred from the availability of institutional
and professional conventions such as a decision-making template that is used to
write decision essays or the expectations that accrue to these templates. This is
usually forgotten because we overlook the connection between the criteria of
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3. evaluation and the conventions of decision making in place when choosing
between options while writing a decision essay. How did these conventions of
decision making come into place? What are the conventions of decision making
or interpretation that we can presuppose in any given situation? To work on the
assumption that a case analysis can concentrate on problem-solving in itself
(without also factoring in the conventions that are implicit in the profession) is
incorrect. It overlooks the larger sense of responsibility that professionals must
have to not only their firms, but to the social conventions and institutions that
make these firms possible in the first place (Bennis and Toole, 2005). It is
therefore not clear in business studies, unlike legal studies and the humanities, as
to what the role and responsibilities of a rhetorical orientation might be in the
context of problem-solving or in furthering the cause of interdisciplinary studies
(Fish, 1989; Brest, 1996; Wizner, 2002; Balkin, 2006).
RHETORIC IN CIVIL SOCIETY
Before asking what the possible uses of rhetoric might be in the context of a case
analysis in business schools, let us ask what its uses have been in the law school
curriculum. The theory and practice of rhetoric has been of immense use in the
law school curriculum since the time of the ancients for a simple reason. The
Greek notion of the ‘polity’ necessarily encompasses an understanding of
rhetoric as a tool of argumentation and persuasion not only in the formulation of
public policy, but also in matters pertaining to the everyday administration of
civil and criminal justice. It was therefore imperative for a Greek citizen in the
city state of Athens, for instance, to be well-grounded in the elements of rhetoric,
which included both the logic of argumentation and public-speaking skills
(Stone, 1989; Lawson-Tancred, 2004). In the absence of these rhetorical skills, the
Athenian citizen was not in a position to participate in civic life, or what we now
define as ‘civil society.’ So the notion of having a say, or a voice, in the life of the
city-state was related to the rhetorical construction of citizenship; this was true of
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4. both law and politics since there was a rhetorical element in the construction of
arguments and the role of persuasion in both; an important problem that comes
up incidentally in the trial of Socrates is precisely his commitment to his daimon
or inner voice and the fact that he seeks to give it expression while discharging
his civic duties (Srinivasan, 2000). This is a different notion of rhetoric obviously
than that which is implied in the popular idea of selling false promises in election
campaigns. When these Athenian ideas of the role of rhetoric in civil society
became a part of the history of pedagogy in subsequent eras in Europe, and were
revived during the Renaissance in Italy and in the United States during the pre-
colonial era, and after, they became the foundations for the notion of political
identity in the Western world (Tinder, 1974; Seligman, 1992; Schmidt, 1998;
Calhoun, 2000; Whitman, 2000).
THE USES OF RHETORIC
The rediscovery of liberal learning then was to find a number of contemporary
uses for the areas of study enshrined in the ‘trivium’ and the ‘quadrivium’
during the European Renaissance (Boorstin, 1985). The contribution of rhetoric,
then, to the construction of civic and political identity was never in dispute
despite the fact that it has had a difficult time in the context of competition for
‘mind-space’ from science and technology. Since these areas mainly use a
technocratic model of reason rather than a philosophical notion of reason, the
importance of rhetoric was not adequately understood in the curriculum of
business schools. Rhetoric however did not go away completely from the
curriculum even though its role was not correctly understood because the
political leadership in the Anglo-American world; and, increasingly in other
parts of the developing world, is traditionally drawn from those with a
background in economic, legal, political, and social studies. The role of rhetoric
in these areas has never been in dispute even when it has had to go through low-
phases in the curricula of technical schools. These problems however become of
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5. interest to us in the context of the theory and practice of the case method because
of the incorporation of the case method as a system of learning by Dean
Christopher Columbus Langdell at the Harvard Law School (Sutherland, 1967;
Kimball, 2004).
RHETORIC & THE CASE METHOD
There are important implications to this development for the system of
professional education as a whole since the case method was to make its
presence felt in other professional schools such as those of education, business,
government, international relations, medicine, and public policy (Corey, 1976;
Corey, 1980; Bonoma, 1989; Garvin, 2003). So, while the term ‘case-method,’ is
invoked across the board, there are a number of interesting differences and
theoretical variations in what is understood by this term. There is another
problem to note as well. The sequence in which professional schools adopted,
and subsequently adapted, Langdell’s pedagogical break-through itself is worth
considering in the history of the case method. Since the ‘source’ discipline for the
case method is law, it is worth comparing the fortunes of rhetoric as theory and
practice in the law school system with that in the business schools. While there is
not sufficient room to do so in this essay, I have tried to capture the fundamental
differences between the law school and business school approaches through the
invocation of ‘reason’ as something that was incorporated into the curriculum in
a technocratic, rather than in a philosophical, form and the subsequent loss of
interest in questions that are traditionally associated with rhetoric such as the
role of language, conventions, interpretation, precedents, and persuasion in
business schools (Srinivasan, 2014). So the notion of problem-solving approaches
in the business school system is affected both by the technocratic and
philosophical definitions of reason; but, much more by the former since business
schools are not only mainly populated by those with a technical education, but
also classified as ‘technical education’ for regulatory purposes. Rhetoric gave
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6. way then to communication which itself was reduced to a technocratic model of
information sharing in lieu of learning the rudiments of stakeholder
management. It is only in recent years that those interested in management
education and managerial psychology have understood that the case method can
develop not only a greater ‘tolerance for ambiguity’ than the lecture method
amongst case discussants, but is also of immense value to contemporary firms
that are characterized by change and uncertainty; it can also be used by forward-
looking firms to anticipate the future in terms of scenario planning (Banning,
2003; Srinivasan, 2012).
RHETORIC IN LAW SCHOOLS
The law school system on the other hand is more affected by a philosophical than
a technocratic model of reason. This is because lawyers are less likely to have a
technical background in terms of undergraduate training. So those who are
trained through the case method in the law school system imbibe the
philosophical notion of reason rather than the technocratic model of reason as
their default program. This does not necessarily mean that they are committed to
a rhetorical world-view. But it does mean that they are more aware of the
traditional debates between reason and rhetoric in the history of philosophy.
Furthermore the forensic approach to law, especially in the context of litigation
in the criminal justice system, demands an understanding of how these debates
are relevant not merely to the theory but also to the practice of law. This can be
inferred from the traditional demands made on lawyers to serve the profession
as a calling rather than as a high-paying profession, and the high probability that
lawyers will proceed to other forms of public service, in the tradition that
Anthony Kronman identified under the rubric of the ‘lawyer-statesman’
(Kronman, 1993). While this notion of ‘lawyer-statesman’ may be a dying breed;
it is, nonetheless, an honourable tradition that has made a substantial
contribution to public life in the United States and elsewhere. What made the
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7. public service transitions possible in this tradition of legal education was
rhetoric, albeit a model of rhetoric that is animated by the role of speech in the
constitution of the polity itself as an object of rhetoric. Consider this model of
problem-solving with that in use in business schools for instance. The notion of
problem-solving, especially in those schools which are not interested in the
narrative frame within which problems are built in the context of the case
method, are more likely to prize quantitative approaches. Those with an interest
in the case method will make room for language in an aetiolated form, but not
necessarily for rhetoric in the sense that is associated with philosophical
skepticism. Only more modest versions have been able to find their way in
business studies given that they are more likely to use a technocratic model of
problem-solving rather than a philosophical model of problem-solving. Why
does this happen? What can be done about this? Should those involved in
management education worry about this?
CONCLUSION
I think the potential of the case method is ‘under-utilized’ in business schools
because of an excessive pre-occupation with linearity as a part of its curricular
design. This is an approach that these schools have adopted from technology
programs, where linear analysis, linear dynamics, and linear programming are
considered to be tools and techniques of great use to engineers. The problem
strictly speaking is not with the concept of linearity per se, but with the
deployment of linear modalities in contexts that are not appropriate to its
methodological assumptions. The obsession with linear forms of analysis in the
case method, as used in business schools, then, is a part of this approach since
most traditional cases are attempts to think about problems in the context of an
industrial society. The challenge for the case method, however, is to ask what
forms of narrative inquiry might be more appropriate in the context of ‘post-
industrial society’ and ‘professional service firms’ where the models of decision
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8. making are different from those of traditional organizations (Srinivasan, 2012).
Moreover these post-industrial societies are characterized by rapid capital,
information, and knowledge flows. What are the forms of change and
uncertainty in contention then in these environments? What are the changes
required not only within the generic structure of the case, but in the modalities of
institutional deployment to re-introduce a more robust notion of rationality,
albeit with an understanding of the tradition form which it emerges in the
history of pedagogy? Hence, then, the significance of Stanley Fish’s question,
which can be understood to mean not only that the generic parameters of a case-
text cannot be taken for granted in terms of its ontology; but, more significantly,
the need to understand the role of ‘interpretation’ (Srinivasan, 2010) and
institutional conventions while deploying the case method in business schools.
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SHIVA KUMAR SRINIVASAN
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