Five Research Strategies for Increasing Rigor in Action Research

In recent decades, governments have encouraged universities to conduct research that positively affects economic growth and social development. This has led to business and engineering researchers increasingly engaging with practitioners, for example, through industrial PhD projects. To achieve the ambition of creating useful knowledge for practitioners, action research (AR) represents a possible path. There are, however, challenges associated with this research approach. Specifically, AR combines elements of traditional research approaches with participation in real-world projects aimed at producing change. Consequently, researchers become highly involved in the study context instead of being detached observers. This poses challenges to research rigor, which may partly explain the relatively low number of AR studies in business and engineering journals as compared to, for example, case studies. To support future AR studies, this chapter defines five research strategies for increasing the rigor of AR. We argue that by using these strategies, researchers can achieve a level of rigor that may even exceed that of case studies. The AR approach may thereby become a more attractive alternative to more popular research approaches.