Business Action Research in Practice—A Strategic Conversation About Conducting Action Research in Business Organizations

The objectiveof this paper is to provide practitioner researchers with insights into the initial findings around the challenges of conducting business action research in practice in commercial settings on the basis of experiences of a PhD cohort at Monash University in the first 18 months of candidature. In performing the role of a concluding paper, it sets out a generic framework for action research that the cohort has come to embrace. In doing so, it draws on emergent themes spread across the six diverse topics that are the subject of action research interventions of the cohort members. The paper then identifies and analyses the common patterns that have emerged and offers observations and conclusions for those involved in practitioner research.     

A Set of Conventions,a Model: An Application of Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model to the Strategic Planning Process

In contemplating better ways to manage, Stafford Beer says the big problem is that you are not determining absolute facts: you are establishing a set of conventions. Hence his view, that a model is neither true nor false: it is more or less useful. And while this paper suggests Beer’s Viable Systems Model (VSM) is overwhelmingly more, rather than less useful, that the VSM and its founding theories are virtually unknown at the level of everyday management begs the question, why? Over time we have learned about the usefulness of the VSM compared to other management theories, when used in the contest of the organisational strategic planning process. Thus through a sequence of diagrams based on Beer’s original drawings, we show how the VSM came to underpin a process for strategic planning in one organisation. The paper has three aims; to attach an everyday ‘common speak’ understanding to some of Beer’s work, to demonstrate how we have learned to appreciate the usefulness of the VSM and its associated diagrams and conventions and to suggest a link between the Action Research change methodology and Beer’s work.     

An Holistic Approach to the Management of Information Systems Development—A View Using a Soft Systems Approach and Multiple Viewpoints

This paper argues that only a systems-based approach to information systems development is likely to cover all the recognized problem issues reported in the literature. It is then shown that software development can be characterized by the structure of the Soft Systems Methodology, so that this methodology acts as a metaphor for the process of information systems development. The structure of this methodology can be seen at lower levels of the development process, and so the model generated here is seen as recursive. Further, information systems development is seen as an unstructured business problem that can be characterized by the Multiple Viewpoint approach. The connections between this approach and the methodology are identified. Finally, the unifying link between these approaches and all forms of action research is identified.