Developing a methodology for multidisciplinary action research: A case study

This paper describes an approach taken to carrying out multidisciplinary action research into contract management within the National Health Service. The work forms part of the ‘Contracts and Competition Programme’ funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. The members of the team had little experience of multidisciplinary research prior to the start of the study and little guidance in this regard is provided in the management science literature. Hence, there was a clearly identified need to develop an approach capable of guiding the work and ensuring that the wide range of disciplinary perspectives within the team could be successfully incorporated into an integrated whole. The approach taken makes use of concepts from soft systems methodology to provide an overarching framework for this purpose and this paper reports on its successes and failures.