Action Research as Experimentation

This paper suggests that the metaphors of experimentation and the laboratory are applicable when positioning action research vis-à-vis more conventional business school research. Following on from three different action research projects in a large multinational pharmaceutical company, the paper argues that an action researcher can never construct a sheltered environment wherein certain qualities of nature can be isolated, purified, and enhanced, but must always undertake research activities in vivo, in real life organizational setting. Still, the metaphor of the laboratory is applicable because it enables for an understanding of how what Ian Hacking calls interventions in the hard sciences share certain characteristics with the action research activities. When action researchers intervene within organizations, the activities are always experimental in nature, i.e., they can never be fully predicted or anticipated, but are initial steps in an emergent process of organizational change.     

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) Versus Outsourcing—Critical Perspectives

This article presents a case example involving the renaming of an organizational change process from BPR to outsourcing. The paper discusses the important ramifications of such a name change in that the recognition of outsourcing allowed an organizational commitment to counseling and termination advice. The paper discusses two ways of looking at the name change, one from a critical theory perspective and one from a realist perspective. It demonstrates how theory can provide useful yet markedly different interpretations of such organizational events. Critical theory operates from within what can be termed the transitive epistemological dimension, whereas critical realism tends to emphasize the importance of ontological issues. Each has important things to say about the situation and improves our understanding overall.     

决策结构设计中的通信网络问题研究

为了适应从“平台中心战”到“网络中心战”的转变,研究了决策网结构设计中的网络容量分配和网络代价问题,全面提升了决策过程和决策质量,在自适应决策结构的构造过程中,根据决策员实时通信结构,建立节点间的信息传输时间模型。在满足平均网络延迟时间最小的基础上,通过计算可获得优化的通信网络容量和网络代价。该研究结果为设计优化的决策网络结构提供了保障,对于提高网络利用率、减少网络构造成本等具有较大的应用价值。     

Intersections of Critical Systems Thinking and Community Based Participatory Research: A Learning Organization Example with the Autistic Community

Critical systems thinking (CST) and community based participatory research (CBPR) are distinct approaches to inquiry which share a primary commitment to holism and human emancipation, as well as common grounding in critical theory and emancipatory and pragmatic philosophy. This paper explores their intersections and complements on a historical, philosophical, and theoretical level, and then proposes a hybrid approach achieved by applying CBPR’s principles and considerations for operationalizing emancipatory practice to traditional systems thinking frameworks and practices. This hybrid approach is illustrated in practice with examples drawn from of the implementation of the learning organization model in an action research setting with the Autistic community. Our experience of being able to actively attend to, and continuously equalize, power relations within an organizational framework that otherwise has great potential for reinforcing power inequity suggests CBPR’s principles and considerations for operationalizing emancipatory practice could be useful in CST settings, and CST’s vocabulary, methods, and clarity around systems thinking concepts could be valuable to CBPR practitioners.     

The Engaged Researcher–From Translator to Literary Change Agent

In this article we reflect upon an integrated approach to action research. The role of the engaged researcher is empirically addressed by using longitudinal field experiences. We take a narrative approach and tell three stories from the field. In analysing the stories we propose a transition of the role of the engaged researcher, from that of a translator of general theory and contextual practices to one of a literary change agent. The literary change agent inspires practitioners by means as concepts, metaphors and storytelling. We suggest that the narrative approach can bring a new and critical flavour to the previously under-explored area of the role of the researcher in action research.

Action Engagement: Improving Researchers’ Involvement in Action Research Projects

This article presents a theoretical and empirical analysis of Action Engagement. This is a methodological approach implying that researchers involve themselves in the organization by working as ordinary employees. Our problem statement is this: How will Action Engagement improve the quality of action research? Given the fact that the researcher has limited time to use in the initial phase, we intend to show that Action Engagement is an effective introduction to the daily organizational life. The data is from an automotive supplier and two hospitals in Norway. The analysis contributes to the field of action research in two respects. First, it offers a detailed and varied understanding of how a broad empirical basis can be obtained in an action research (AR) project. Second, it presents an empirically grounded understanding of how this method can be used to achieve increased credibility and trust in ways that enable the researcher to bring in new and important aspects in organizational dialogues.     

Strategic Management in Action

This paper sets out to overview the strategic management process and its alignment with a systemic approach and to briefly review the necessary enablers, namely: the presence and practice of learning at the individual, group, and organizational level, a culture of exploration and innovation, which implies a receptiveness to new ideas, and the space or opportunities to practise the skills putting the learnings into action. Having set the study's theoretical context, the paper then explores some of the realities and implications, both for strategic management and the action researcher, by examining two quite different case scenarios from within a large Australian-based financial services organization, the first, Case Study A, involving a more strategic focus, and the second, Case Study B, an operational one.     

Towards a Dynamic Model of Organisational Flexibility

Organisational flexibility, as the ability to adapt quickly to new or changing environments, has received growing attention from both researchers and managers as a key driver for companies to survive and prosper in turbulent and unpredictable environments. Although many scholars have studied the complex nature and multidimensional structure of this construct, research on a comprehensive model, which explains the relationships between its key variables and consequent side effects of such iterations, remains a challenge. We explore these interactions and the dynamic adaptation processes applying system dynamics modelling to develop a more robust organisational flexibility theory. The objective of this paper is twofold, to provide dynamic propositions related to several strategies along different enterprise lifecycle stages and to complement the transition guidelines proposed by the organizational flexibility framework. The results suggest that decision concerning flexible capabilities management and organizational responsiveness can be improved if organizational flexibility is analysed and evaluated incorporating the time-varying dimension. The analysis help to test and expand current theory, envisage new theoretical propositions and provide new alternatives for empirical results about the complex construct of organizational flexibility.     

Action Learning as a Mindset—The Evolution of PICCO

This paper investigates action learning as a maintenance of mindset. It is an account of a personal evolution from a 4-year work in progress Action Research (AR) study exploring organizational viability. That study, involving two separate organizations and four cycles of AR, has seen the researcher and to some extent the organizations develop action-learning mindsets. The paper is an attempt to step outside the study and its associated learning from an organizational perspective and to link the threads of learning from the mindset of an action researcher. The paper suggests that adopting the mindset of an action researcher favors the transfer of learning from one organizational situation to another. Advocating that action researchers do not restart their initial methodologies, it is contended that the second organization has gained advantage of learning from the first. It is concluded that action learning mindsets articulate cumulative wisdom from organizational and methodological perspectives.     

Rhetorics and Realities in Public Service Organizations: Systemic Practice and Organizational Learning as Critically Reflexive Action Research (CRAR)

This article sets out to develop an argument and theory-in-practice related to organizational learning and systemic practice as critically reflexive action research (CRAR). It explores principles and concepts associated with CRAR, in the context of different emphases in understandings of and approaches to managing or working with change. The notion of epistemologies of practice is developed, as the basis for introducing on-site and off-site CRAR as interweaving cycles of managerial and organizational learning. A multilayered illustration of an improvisational CRAR environment, using principles of dialectical enquiry and critical learning theater, is offered. A diagrammatic analysis provides the framework for describing and reflecting critically on key CRAR processes. This is expanded with a consideration of possibilities for documentation that can assist with the validation of quality in CRAR processes and outcomes. This has relevance in the context of postpositivist action research at postgraduate levels or within project-based CRAR partnerships. This leads to a further discussion of principles and concepts, in the context of other literature and pressures on public services.     

Critical introductory notes on farming systems research in developing third world agriculture

In Third World agricultural research of household-managed production units, the systems approach is applied in the form of Farming Systems Research (FSR). Several authors reviewed here have criticized the way in which this is done. It appears that most of them neglect the fact that most FSR belongs to the hard systems approach. The problem context (the household production unit and its surrounding socioeconomic system), however, consists of sense-giving subjects, which have conflicting goals and interests. Their thinking and behavior are determined largely by power relations. Therefore, in FSR, the hard systems approach should be discarded and a critical alternative approach should be developed instead.     

Participatory Action Research and the Development of Critical Creativity: A “Natural” Combination?

This paper focuses on the research strategy that I employed during doctoral studies. An overarching framework of Action Research (AR) was used in the development of a complementary approach to creative studies. At the time of the studies AR seemed to be a natural choice and I did not overly concern myself with exploring as to why that was the case. However, I recognize the value of contemplating the appropriateness of research strategy and, in this paper, now reflect on some of the parallel strands implicit in AR and in critical creativity that I now realize served to enrich the overall research process.     

Elaborating a Critical Realist Approach to Soft Systems Methodology

Systemic Practice and Action Research - This paper explores the implications of adopting a critical realist approach to soft systems methodology (SSM) both to address local problematic situations...     

Leadership and Learning: A Critical Reexamination of Senge’s Learning Organization

From its inception the concept of the learning organization has been identified with a particular type of organization or new forms of organizational learning. But it is often forgotten that Senge’s ‘system thinking’ formulation of the learning organization was inseparable from an attempt to reformulate a new way of thinking about change agency and leadership in organizations. Here it is argued that Senge’s learning organization can be re-conceptualised as a partial fusion of ‘systems thinking’ and learning theories that leads to a concept of organizational learning as a form of ‘distributed leadership’. However, the concept is critically flawed because it cannot theorise the organizing practices by which learning to lead and leading to learn are shared or distributed in organizations. It is concluded that Senge’s under-theorized focus on distributed leadership consistently neglects issues of practice and issues of power. As such his work does not provide an exploration of the possibilities for increasing the dispersal of human agency, power, knowledge and autonomy within the workplace.     

Power-Based Arbitrary Decisional Actions in the Resolution of MIS Project Issues: A Project Manager's Action Research Perspective

As a management information systems (MIS) project manager and an action researcher, the author examined, over time, the influence on information system development (ISD) of the informal sociopolitical organizational actions. The paper reports two cases of action research findings concerning the effect on ISD project implementation processes of power-based arbitrary decisional actions in bureaucratic environments. The research focused on the relationship of such unilateral actions to the interconnected subprocesses of deliberate and conscious attempts by the ISD project members to define and resolve system implementation issues. A suggested conceptual framework for the issue-resolution processes (IRP's) and obstacle-coping processes (OCP's) is based on the author's IRP/OCP-related behavioral constructs and theoretical models dealing with soft-systems issues, especially appreciative system theory and soft-systems methodology, and innovative flexible, "complementarist" (Sinn, 1998) or pluralist problem-solving approaches.     

Self-Reflection and Vulnerability in Action Research: Bringing Forth New Worlds in Our Learning

This paper looks at experiences in using action research in a self-reflective fashion. It addresses some of the problems which the action researcher has in coping with ourselves in our research. Mendes (1996) quotes Maturana: Everything is fundamental in our being alive and therefore, if we want to explain human experience we need to understand how being alive together generates our existence.² Although I would add that the social view of existence can be complemented by the view that our personal existence comes forth from a deeper domain, this statement is my starting point. Working from a anecdote which demonstrates the critical importance of individual perception in labeling any issue as a mess, I discuss the importance of self-reflection in the research process and the importance to us as researchers in recognizing our own vulnerability in the research context. Finally, I describe some positive outcomes or prizes of recognizing our vulnerability in research processes and using this vulnerability as a spur to improving our research.     

校企合作氛围对高校科研人员科研绩效的影响——技术能力的中介作用

在跨层次视角下,基于哈尔滨工业大学987位科研人员的相关数据,采用多层线性模型(HLM)方法和软件,研究了中国高校组织层次的校企合作氛围对高校科研人员科研绩效的直接影响及科研人员技术能力的中介作用。研究发现：高校组织层次的校企合作氛围对科研人员科研绩效的影响呈倒U型;科研人员的技术能力与科研绩效之间显著正相关;跨层次视角下,高校组织层次的校企合作氛围对科研人员的技术能力呈倒U型影响;高校科研人员的技术能力在校企合作氛围与科研人员科研绩效之间存在跨层次的部分中介作用。研究揭示了高校组织层次的校企合作氛围影响科研人员科研绩效的具体机制,丰富了校企合作与高校科研绩效关系的研究成果,为国家政府部门和高校管理部门制定科学合理的科技管理政策提供了理论依据和实践参考。     

EVA考核,研发费用管理与央企创新效率

以2009年实施EVA(economic value added)考核这一事件为契机,基于研发费用管理视角考察EVA考核对央企创新效率的影响路径.通过双重差分模型和超越对数面板随机前沿模型实证研究后发现,实施EVA考核显著提高央企的研发费用正向管理水平,且通过研发费用正向管理这一中间渠道能提高央企创新效率,意味着EVA考核能够在一定程度上缓解央企创新方面委托代理矛盾.在进一步研究中,以"微利"或"微增"央企为切入点,发现高管进行研发费用正向管理时会兼顾企业利润总额,其目的仅是为了获取更高考核值.因此,EVA考核的激励作用是有限的.     

A Design View on Research in Social Sciences

Research in social sciences has not had the same impact as research in natural sciences and several authors are critical of social science research methods. In order to elucidate this problem, the author analyzes the purpose of research in general and in social sciences in particular. The author makes reference to various research methods that are suggested and used in social sciences. Social science research differs from research in natural sciences. It differs not only in being dependent on actions of human individuals but also because systems in social sciences are a complex mixture of Hard and Soft systems. The paper argues that research in Human Activity Systems should focus on design. This view changes the research perspective and the demands on the research methods to be used. The author suggests a method based on focusing decision settings combined with Action Research.     

Building in Dialogue Between Consumers and Staff in Acute Mental Health Services

This paper describes some aspects of the methodology, material, and findings from a lengthy participatory action research engagement by a consumer organization in Australia, which was undertaken in collaboration with staff at a major public psychiatric hospital and then went on to involve players throughout the local and national mental health services system. A small first phase established a dialogic methodology for the exchange of experiences and thinking between staff and consumers. The purpose of the second phase of the research was to explore how consumers' voices might be heard, and how staff–consumer communication about that feedback, might be built in to ongoing organizational structure and culture. Systems thinking about defensive routines, silences, and voice-as-discourse is reported as offering a possible way of cracking the puzzle of the closed-loop cycle of claim/ blame-defense-and-counter-claim/blame-defense that has been characteristic to date.