HRD research and design science: recasting interventions as artefacts

AbstractThis article is concerned with the design science approach as a potential enabler of problem-focused and solution-led HRD research. The article highlights the issues of the relevance and impact of HRD research and considers the design science approach as one way of resolving these matters. It summarizes by way of background the origins and precepts of design science, delineates HRD research from classical design sciences and explanatory sciences, analyses the ways in which management researchers have interpreted and applied design science and recognizes parallels with HRD research. The article argues that HRD research should endeavour to produce both problem-relevant generalizable knowledge that is useable by HRD practitioners to solve their pressing organizational field problems and its own class of theories. It proposes the recasting of HRD interventions as artefacts based on a logic of design and prescription. The article concludes by suggesting some ways in which an ‘HRD research as design science’ agenda might be advanced.Keywords: design sciencehuman resource developmentinterventions AcknowledgementsI am very grateful to the Editor of HRDI and two anonymous HRDI reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this article; any errors or omissions are of course all mine.Notes1. ‘The designer is concerned with how things ought to be … in order to attain goals and to function’, and artefacts are designed to function in such a way that goals may be attained (Simon Citation1996, 4, original emphases).2. Van Aken (Citation2005, 22) distinguishes between applied science and design science thus: ‘I prefer to avoid these terms [i.e. “basic” and “applied” science] as they suggest that sciences such as medicine and engineering merely apply the results of the true “basic” sciences, thus negating the extensive and significant scientific knowledge that these [design] sciences generate themselves.’3. Artefact, artificial, artefactual: product of individual or collective human skill or its application, rather than originating naturally.4. The term ‘paradigm’ is not used to denote a ‘closed set of basic beliefs’, rather it refers to the research questions asked, research methods accepted as appropriate and the nature of the resulting research products (Denyer, Tranfield, and van Aken Citation2008, 395).5. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of this article for pointing out these interesting possibilities.