A growing number of organizations and organizational practices around the world are incorporating criteria of justice and sustainability in their value proposition. With them, new meanings arise in the conceptual and analytic frameworks used in organizational studies. For example, Innovation and the systemic approach can be reconsidered in the context of value creation for society. This article reflects on how innovation can be understood by an undergraduate management school and its academic department (specifically at the Unidad de Gestión of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru), and on how this understanding affects the purpose of the school itself, its academic model, and the relation with its environment.

Research in organizational management faces the challenge of understanding, building and disseminating knowledge about a study object that presents itself as something subjective, difficult and complex to handle: the organizations or a group of them. In this situation, the case study as a research strategy of social phenomena is seen as a relevant option for the researcher, in a context in which the use of intensive over extensive strategies improves the quality of the understanding of this phenomenon in relation to the context in which it occurs. In this perspective, this paper seeks to provide a clearer view of the case study research on organizational management through a review of the literature on the subject and the authors’ own experience on this topic, so that questions about the use, opportunity and feasibility of this strategy will be answered.

Research in organizational management faces the challenge of understanding, building and disseminating knowledge about a study object that presents itself as something subjective, difficult and complex to handle: the organizations or a group of them. In this situation, the case study as a research strategy of social phenomena is seen as a relevant option for the researcher, in a context in which the use of intensive over extensive strategies improves the quality of the understanding of this phenomenon in relation to the context in which it occurs. In this perspective, this paper seeks to provide a clearer view of the case study research on organizational management through a review of the literature on the subject and the authors’ own experience on this topic, so that questions about the use, opportunity and feasibility of this strategy will be answered.

Research in organizational management faces the challenge of understanding, building and disseminating knowledge about a study object that presents itself as something subjective, difficult and complex to handle: the organizations or a group of them. In this situation, the case study as a research strategy of social phenomena is seen as a relevant option for the researcher, in a context in which the use of intensive over extensive strategies improves the quality of the understanding of this phenomenon in relation to the context in which it occurs. In this perspective, this paper seeks to provide a clearer view of the case study research on organizational management through a review of the literature on the subject and the authors’ own experience on this topic, so that questions about the use, opportunity and feasibility of this strategy will be answered.

El texto se ocupa de dos asuntos epistemológicos clave para discutir la naturaleza de las Ciencias de la Gestión. En la primera parte, se desarrolla la cuestión referida a su estatuto, donde se discute si las Ciencias de la Gestión son una ciencia, una técnica o un arte, repasando desde perspectivas clásicas herederas del cartesianismo y la tradición positivista hasta enfoques contemporáneos más atentos al carácter intersubjetivo y constructivista del conocimiento científico y científico-social en particular. En la segunda parte, la cuestión que nos ocupa es la del objeto de conocimiento en este campo del saber, donde se reportan distintas aproximaciones y se aprovecha la kuhniana para concluir en una perspectiva de objetos plurales.