Case stories or teaching tales are widespread in every professional jurisdiction. They provide for something other than maps or manuals. They are primarily an oral literature that circulate in any profession from senior to junior, from peer to peer. They embody far more than the formalized and canonical ‘rules and regulations’ of manuals and the far more informal ‘map’ which proposes how you get from one place to another and what considerations you might have to keep in mind as you go. Case stories intend to do far more than either and perhaps can be best distinguished as providing the listener/reader with a sense of having been there.

David Epston