Leaping Into Real-World Relevance: An “Abduction” Process for Nonprofit Research

Abstract

Positioned in the midst of the heated debate about the production of relevant and usable knowledge for practitioners in the nonprofit sector and a serious shortage of high-impact research that speaks to practice, the purpose of this Research Note is to direct nonprofit scholarship toward embracing “abduction,” which is the initial creative stage in scientific inquiry that facilitates the formulation of testable explanatory hypotheses and makes new discoveries in a sensory and logically structured way. We use an emerging interest in social innovation by the nonprofit sector as an illustrative example to show the advantages of using abductive reasoning as the primary method of reasoning for discovering new knowledge of a nascent but vital phenomenon. The novel contribution of this Research Note lies in encouraging scholarship on the nonprofit sector to an applied “practice-led” research process that is intellectually relevant and has the potential to bridge the scholar–practice divide.

Social Innovation in Disability Nonprofits: An Abductive Study of Capabilities for Social Change

“…Abductive logic can assist in exploring and contemplating a phenomenon of interest in complexity terms, as defined by the researcher’s own observations and actions based on a careful process entailing researcher reflexivity, openness to paradox, a hunt for “surprising facts,” and the arriving at contextualized judgments (Svennevig, 2001). These are necessary steps of logic when dealing with a complex and ill-defined topic area (Taylor et al, 2018a).…”

“…We refer to this method of data collection as a “researcher-in-residence,” which essentially involves a researcher residing with and learning from organizational subjects to understand the phenomenon of interest at close range via different perspectives and ongoing transitional states. This “mind-and-reality comparing” stage grapples with complex realities by providing opportunities for researcher–practitioner relationing, reflecting, untangling, and reconnecting of tentative understandings as they spontaneously emerge in situ (Taylor et al, 2018a).…”

“…The use of an abduction-based method of reasoning, as applied to the nonprofit research domain by Taylor et al (2018a, pp. 10-16), involves blending context specificity, theoretical knowledge, and practical experiences through a deliberate and iterative process comprising four steps: (a) grounding the social innovation phenomenon in context; (b) theoretical (non-field) observations; (c) practical (direct-field) observations; and (d) practice–theory iteration to arrive at a “working” hypothesis.…”

“…To date, there have been limited rigorous analyses into social innovation in NPO contexts, resulting in underdeveloped knowledge of the organizational capabilities needed to pursue social innovation (Howaldt & Schwarz, 2017; Lettice & Parekh, 2010). Ongoing conceptual imprecision (Ayob, Teasdale, & Fagan, 2016), the phenomenon’s highly contextualized nature (Newth, 2018), and the common use of research methods that fail to account for the inherent complexities of organizational contexts (Taylor, Torugsa, & Arundel, 2018a) are possible factors contributing to the pretheoretical state of the current knowledge base.…”

“…This study takes a significant step toward adressing these challenges by applying an abduction process following the specific approach suggested by Taylor et al (2018a) to identify the organizational capabilities that enable two Australian disability NPOs to design socially innovative services to benefit the lives of people with disabilities. Through close-range observations and careful diagnosis of the social innovation phenomenon obtained from the “researcher-in-residence” approach, data from 52 in-depth interviews and observational notes were collected and analyzed through thematic coding.…”