To study how practitioners deploy case management theory, I devised an original methodological approach for comparing oral and written narratives. While most historical and sociological studies of social work practice use only the case record, I combined the written and spoken narratives of the same event to produce a more nuanced, synchronic account of social work and management practice. And with these combined narratives I asked a crucial question: had the oral or written record been subtracted, what of the experience would have been silenced? In answering this question, I established the central limitation of the case record: it contains formal textbook knowledge and the oral contains both textbook and situated, or practical knowledge. It is in this way that I have challenged historians and sociologists (I organized a 1999 session addressing these issues at the annual meetings of the Social Science History Association) to qualify conclusions drawn solely from the written texts of workers. I summarized (2000) this technique and the findings in “Reading the Case Record: The Oral and Written Narratives of Social Workers” (Social Service Review, 74(2): 169-192). In short, because situated knowledge exists in the oral narrative, scholars fail to recognize it; thus practical wisdom remains in the shadow of the more privileged and readily available case record. I continued to refine the technique for the study of professional theory in practice and have written and published two related manuscripts on methodology. In one, “A Method for Investigating Practitioner Use of Theory in Practice” (Qualitative Social Work, 3(2): 161-177), I outlined a comparative method for studying the use of theory (technical-rational or knowledge/power) in practice (situated or practical knowledge). And in the second, an invited book chapter, “Ethnography: A Case Study of Invented Clinical Knowledge” (in The Qualitative Research Experience, edited by Deborah K. Padgett), I describe how ‘practice ethnography’ can be used to collect oral practice narrative data.