Intervention Research as Management Research in Practice: Learning from a Case in the Fashion Design Industry
| Author | Marco Guerci,Abraham B. (Rami) Shani,Stefano Cirella,Giovanni Radaelli |
| Published date | 01 April 2014 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00844.x |
| Date | 01 April 2014 |
Methodology Corner
Intervention Research as Management
Research in Practice: Learning from a
Case in the Fashion Design Industry
Giovanni Radaelli, Marco Guerci, Stefano Cirella and
Abraham B. (Rami) Shani1
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Via
Lambruschini 4/B, 20156 Milan, Italy, and 1Department of Management, Economics and Industrial
Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, Via Lambruschini 4/B, 20156 Milan, Italy, and Orfalea College of
Business, California Polytechnic State University, 1 Grand Avenue Building 3, 93407 San Luis Obispo,
California, USA
Corresponding author email: giovanni.radaelli@polimi.it
Research in the field of management and organizational sciences has yielded a deeper
understanding of many emerging business issues. However, the relevance of the contri-
butions has been increasingly criticized, in both the academic and public spheres. We
propose the intervention research approach – originally developed by the research group
at Ecole des Mines de Paris – as a design science approach able to address both the
relevance gap issue and the growing complexity of management practice. It is argued
that increasing our understanding of management requires research that is more insight-
ful, influential and immediately applicable. This in turn requires closer collaboration
between management and researchers during the inquiry process, which is not always
easy to achieve. An illustrative case study of an intervention research project focusing on
creativity, conducted in Italy in collaboration with a fashion company, demonstrates how
intervention research can be rigorous and relevant to practitioners, and how it can
advance theoretical knowledge in management science.
Introduction
Management research is being increasingly chal-
lenged for its limited impact on business and gov-
ernment (Fincham and Clark, 2009; Hodgkinson
and Starkey, 2011). This criticism creates an
opportunity to introduce novel perspectives on
management research that more satisfactorily
address the relevance dimension. Specifically,
several authors have proposed moving beyond the
traditional treatment of management research as
an ‘explanatory science’ oriented to description,
explanation and prediction of phenomena and
embracing instead a ‘design science’ perspective.
This perspective seeks to assimilate the scientific
quest for truth (‘is this proposition true?’) into a
practical concern for relevance (‘will it work
better?’) (Jelinek, Romme and Boland, 2008).
Design science calls for the production of knowl-
edge and artefacts that simultaneously advance
our body of knowledge and improve perform-
ances (Van Aken, 2005).
The opportunity to adopt a design science per-
spective has sparked considerable debate in the
research community. However, actual approaches
that engage in design science are still infrequent
and have yet to gain high visibility and legitimacy
in the research community (Symon et al., 2008).
Intervention research (IR) provides a salient
example. IR seeks to design changes within
organizations by enumerating the dynamics by
which such changes are contextualized and
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British Journal of Management, Vol. 25, 335–351 (2014)
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-8551.2012.00844.x
© 2012 The Author(s)
British Journal of Management © 2012 British Academy of Management. Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd,
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA, 02148, USA.
formalized (Hatchuel, 2001). IR has by now
reached theoretical maturity1(David and Hatch-
uel, 2008) but only a limited amount of published
empirical research can be found in the literature.
The reasons for this lack of exposure are twofold.
First, existing contributions do not fully commu-
nicate the potential of IR in terms of advancing
theoretical knowledge, practical relevance and
scientific rigour. Second, there is a lack of illustra-
tive knowledge about the workings of IR since
there is little English-based literature that maps
out and clarifies the essence of its inquiry process.
The aim of this paper is to advance the dissemi-
nation of IR by addressing these two issues. In the
first two sections of the paper we identify six theo-
retical and practical challenges in management
research that point towards the added value of a
design science perspective, and describe how these
are theoretically fulfilled by IR. The final two sec-
tions present a case study that illustrates how the
IR inquiry process can be implemented and how it
can produce rigorous and relevant knowledge to
researchers and practitioners.
Research challenges in
management research
Emerging approaches to management research
are likely to be legitimized by their capacity to
support the production of knowledge which (a)
advances the theoretical field, (b) is scientifically
rigorous and (c) is usable by practitioners (Cassell
and Lee, 2011). In particular, new research
approaches are likely to emerge if they help
researchers address challenges that still inhibit
their production of rigorous and relevant
research.
What are these challenges? This question is open
to multiple answers. Challenges depend on the
‘knowledge-constituting assumptions’ (Johnson
et al., 2006) that researchers adopt to substantiate
the notions of ‘rigour’ and ‘relevance’. ‘Design
science’, in this regard, moves from a non-
positivist stance by which (a) society does not
manifest regularities, but rather continuous
processes of change; and (b) reality is the result
of social construction and cannot be neutrally
accessed by external observers. Adopting this
standpoint, researchers face the following major
challenges.
Theoretical advancement of management science
Theoretical advances depend on the ability to
accommodate the inherent complexity – struc-
tural and dynamic – of both management and
organizations. Three features are required.
Focus on change and development. Researchers
are increasingly embracing a view which incorpo-
rates change into the core of their investigations in
order to supersede the emphasis on a stable reality
that characterizes positivism (Tsoukas and Chia,
2002). Escalating uncertainty and competition
force organizations constantly to change in an
effort to retain a sustainable advantage (Bucha-
nan et al., 2005). Change is thus the key subject of
research, because it is precisely the capability that
organizations seek to cultivate and institutional-
ize (Van de Ven and Poole, 1995). Its investigation
requires the emergence of approaches that can
take systematic account of the dynamism of
organizational actors and managerial decisions.
Support for multi-level analysis. There is growing
recognition that organizations are affected by
factors located at multiple levels of analysis and
cannot be fully disentangled. Pfeffer (1997) recog-
nized that attention should be paid to ‘(a) the
effects of social organizations on the behaviour
and attitudes of individuals within them; (b) the
effects of individuals’ characteristics and actions
on organizations, with particular emphasis on the
powerful individual influences that may exist
within organizational systems; [. . .] (c) the mutual
effects of environments – including resource, task,
political, and cultural environments – upon
organizations and vice versa’ (p. 4). This complex-
ity opens various venues for improvement, such as
improving the micro-foundations of macro–
macro relationships (Abell, Felin and Foss, 2008),
building reliable meso-level constructs (Mathieu
and Taylor, 2007) or introducing multi-level
models able to control for ‘unobserved heteroge-
neity’ (Klein, Dansereau and Hall, 1994). The
dominant approaches recognize these needs
but struggle to meet them (Payne et al., 2011).
1Two distinct IR approaches have been developed in two
French institutions, namely Ecole des Mines de Paris and
ISEOR and Institute d’Administration des Enterprises,
University Jean Moulin Lyon. The focus of this work is
on the approach developed at Ecole des Mines de Paris.
336 G. Radaelli et al.
© 2012 The Author(s)
British Journal of Management © 2012 British Academy of Management.
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