Twenty-second International Conference on Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Organizations

Abstract

Historically, conceptions of organizational research have been rooted in social sciences, and social scientists often mimicked what physical scientists do to study very different phenomena. In short, organizational researchers traditionally have generated knowledge about organizations by standing outside organizations and then providing general prescriptions for organizational improvement. Even action research utilizes a social science approach to knowledge generation with organizational actors temporarily stepping out of the roles they play within an organization to “play” social scientists studying what they and others do within their organizations. This paper suggests that rethinking organizational resilience will likely require us to rethink—and expand in somewhat unconventional ways—our notions of organizational research. Rather than thinking of research as being something done by others who are not part of the organizations they study, we may need to develop an approach to inquiry and knowledge generation that is played out within an organization by members of the organization as part of organizational decision-making processes. Specifically, the paper describes an approach to inquiry rooted in Aristotle’s notion of practical reasoning and illustrate what this approach looked like and the issues that got raised when it was implemented within an organization. The project employed a study-within-a-study design. At the center was a study of a public organization conducted by representatives from different stakeholder groups. The study process also was systematically considered as it unfolded by researchers, some of whom observed what happened as active participants and other who participated only in the observer role.