Reimagining research methods: from scientific training to organisational investigation capability.

Over the past decades business schools have made significant strides in aligning their programmes with employability agenda. Capstone projects, industry partnerships and experiential learning have become central features of many curricula. Yet, one element has remained relatively unchanged: the way we teach research methods. Typically oriented towards the norms of academic inquiry, these courses continue to prioritise hypothesis testing, methodological purity, and journal style outputs. While valuable in their own right, such approaches may not fully equip students with skills they need to investigate and address complex organisational problems in practice.  

Its prevalence is such that even when doing a consultancy project as part of capstone, students are typically required to turn organisational problems into ‘research questions’. The final report that is produced is required to fit the traditional research dissertation structure and is evaluated as such. Consultancy projects are tolerated so long as they fit within the mould of research dissertation.  

The dominance of academic research comes from management discipline’s historical preoccupation with the need to establish rigour. Research methods courses have become arena where the discipline’s legitimacy is constructed and contested. However, it might not be most appropriate way to develop practice-ready graduates.  

With shifting focus on employability, students need practice-oriented inquiry skills. The issue is not about research vs. no research or soft rigour. It is about building a different type of rigor. It is about providing methodological foundations that will enable them to conduct organisational inquiries. Students should be able to comprehend and frame messy work problems, work with incomplete data, at the same time iterating with stakeholders and generating actionable insights from knowledge.  

Action research, and its varieties, with its emphasis on plan-act-reflect cycles has the foundations to equip students with these skills.  The UK has a long tradition in practice oriented education, dating back to 1950s and 60s, with Tavistock Institute and executive training arising from civil service reforms. We can find similar evidence in Europe. For example in in France with Recherche-intervention which has strong links between grandes écoles and organisational engagement. In Germany ‘Handlungsforschung’ tradition that builds on dual system influence of theory and practice. These approaches never fully accepted the strict separation between research and practice or knowledge generation from action as seen in the rigour vs. relevance project. Therefore, the question is not about rigour versus relevance. It is about how we design forms of rigour that are meaningful in practice.  

What could practice oriented methods course look like? At Edinburgh Business School (Heriot Watt University) we are considering various options. At the core should be the plan-act-observe reflection cycles. It should be structured around diagnosing, intervening, learning and adapting a process inquiry in action. This is a shift from learning how to formulate a research question to constructing a meaningful organisational problem. Here students learn about distinguishing symptoms and underlying problems, mapping stakeholder and perspectives and understanding organisational context (power, culture). Methods then are tools within this broader inquiry process. Hypothesis act as interventions (if we change X, what happens?). Interpreting data and making defensible judgement should cover skills in working with incomplete and messy data, evaluating conflicting evidence, bias awareness, and ethical considerations. In this way, students are not just generating insights but justifying them under uncertainty. The final part requires them to evaluate outcomes of interventions, linking action back to theory, and evidence impact. 

Critiques would argue that practice-oriented approaches risk producing graduates who can ‘do’ but not ‘think’. This argument is built on false premise, one that separates thinking from doing. It also underestimates the intellectual demands of diagnosing and articulating organisational problems and overestimates the transferability of abstract research skills to practice. Organisational problems are often ambiguous, politically shaped, and dynamically evolving. If anything, organisational inquiry raises the bar for critical thinking by removing the safety of well-defined research problems. Graduates never enter organisations as academic researchers or as fully formed consultants. They enter as problem solvers who must make sense of complex situations, work with others and generate actionable insight under uncertainty. Action research, in particular, makes intervention itself an object of inquiry. It requires students to analyse situations and reflect on consequences of their actions.   

More broadly, we need to move away from one-off final projects and standalone methods courses. Instead, live projects should cut across courses and assessments should be based on problem framing and intervention design.  

If employability matters, we need to rethink what counts as method and evidence.  And if business schools are serious about employability, rethinking the research method course is foundational. Otherwise, we will continue producing graduates trained for journals they will never write in, rather than organisations they will actually work in.