This chapter seeks to illuminate pathways for “thinking differently” about research approaches for pharmacy practice, social pharmacy, and health services research by leaning on theoretical advances made in organization and management science (OMS). In particular, the perspective of “practical rationality,” derived from a process philosophical worldview, is highlighted as a truly alternative framework for designing and enacting productive social research. To deliver practically rational findings, researchers need to think differently and more deeply about practice reality and how it is understood.

Process philosophy provides a comprehensive and unified perspective of reality, its character, and how we might understand ourselves in that reality. Congruent methodologies can enable development of research processes and outcomes that capture a logic of pharmacy practice that more closely reflects practitioners’ experience of that practice, thus narrowing the gap between theory and practice. Outcomes can provide a different and more complex “system of picturing” phenomena and objects of study than more normative rationalistic, reductionist, and quantitative approaches. Findings can reveal how patterned unfolding processes and practices interrelate and come together to produce some aspect of human life or work, providing new opportunities for intervention. It provides the opportunity for pharmacy practice research that may catch a reality of pharmacy practice in flight.