North American Case Research Association

The North American Case Research Association (NACRA) is a nonprofit, collaborative, voluntary professional association of approximately 500 researchers and postsecondary teachers, mostly in business and administrative disciplines. Members are from all over the world, teach at many types of colleges and universities, and offer expertise in various disciplines. The NACRA was founded in 1958 with the organizational mission to promote excellence in case research, writing, and teaching in business and other academic disciplines. Pragmatically, the emphasis continues to be on developing and distributing instructional case studies and their corresponding teaching notes to foster scholarly analyses of the cases. Cases used for instructional purposes are products of case study research. Case study research involves systematically investigating a single event or phenomenon, gathering data, analyzing data, and reporting the results in the form of a case. NACRA's intention is to encourage high-quality case research and to provide information for college and university instructors who want to use case method instruction in their classrooms. Case study and analysis is viewed as a teaching methodology that facilitates inductive learning and challenges and motivates students to engage actively. As such, NACRA contributes substantively to the body of knowledge about effective teaching practice as well as case research.

The case method of teaching (which was made famous by Harvard University) uses problems taken from real-life situations applied to a variety of fields and disciplines. The case method encourages students to focus on concrete cases to develop their intellectual capacity for diagnosing and formulating problems accurately, finding answers that offer the most complete solution to the problem in question, and working toward implementing these solutions by choosing the means and planning the activities.

As an international association of scholars, NACRA currently uses various strategies to realize its mission of promoting excellence in case research, writing, and teaching in six interrelated activities: [Page 612](1) sponsoring an annual meeting for the presentation and improvement of new, peer-reviewed cases and papers on issues related to case pedagogy; (2) publishing a quarterly peer-reviewed journal; (3) promoting the worldwide distribution and use of NACRA cases; (4) providing professional development seminars and activities aimed at enhancing skills in case research, writing, and teaching; (5) working to enhance the legitimacy and status of case research and pedagogy within academic institutions and professional associations; and (6) supporting the work of NACRA-affiliated regional organizations and collaborating with other professional organizations having complementary objectives. Each of these organizational activities is briefly described below, followed by a list of resources and Web sites that can be used for further research.