Methodological Strategies for Design-Oriented Research in Organizations

Design-oriented research can be defined as research into planned interventions in the natural context of organizations with the aim to develop a knowledge base for the innovation and improvement of those interventions. This kind of research has to face the double hurdle of both academic quality and practical relevance. There are two main strategies for successfully taking this double hurdle. The first strategy follows the perspective of the knowledge supplier and adjusts academic research to comply with practical needs, whereas the second strategy integrates academic research in the design of the practical organizational change program. In that case research is regarded from the perspective of the knowledge consumer. This paper elaborates upon the second strategy. More specifically, we reflect on our experiences with a small-and a large-scale organizational change programs. The first program offered the empirical base for a retrospective comparative case study within 14 SMEs and aimed to develop theory on intervention strategies. The second study is based on a database built by a strong pool of field workers that systematically reported observations before, during and after their interventions within 650 SMEs. This paper shows how these small-and large-scale change projects offered a fruitful platform to obtain both academic and practical understandings of organizational change. Indeed, the empirical context of intervention programs can be used to get insight in the practical management of change processes, and at the same time it is suited for more academic purposes like the development of new knowledge about organizational change. In this context three issues are discussed: (1) the origin of theory building, (2) the relationship between design and development, and (3) safety measures to prevent mutual contamination of research and action.