Inquiry (original) (raw)

Oxford University Press eBooks, 2018

Abstract

This chapter narrates the efforts of a hospital cardiology department to create its country’s first chronic heart failure (CHF) multidisciplinary unit. With an average treatment cost that was too high, threatening their required funding, the department’s actors strove to reduce it. They analyzed collective activity, made exploratory hypotheses about cost drivers, and developed new performance measurements to verify their hypotheses. This is an example of the social process of inquiry. The chapter presents the pragmatist definition of inquiry, a non-dualist and relational framework, recursively articulated with the concept of habit. It integrates action and thought, narrative and logical thought. The respective roles of the three types of inference identified by Peirce are analyzed: abduction, deduction, and induction. The chapter highlights the mediated and mediating nature of inquiry, illustrated in the hospital case by the reengineering of management indicators, and closes with the major differences between inquiry and the mainstream problem-solving framework.

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