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.     

Researching-Acting-Reflecting on Public Health Services in Venezuela. II. Community Action and Critique

This paper, the second in a duology reporting on an action research project about public health services in Venezuela, presents a narrative of an intervention process launched on the basis of the conceptual framework presented in the first paper of the duology. Thereafter, a deeper reflection on such process, its meaning and its historical possibilities is presented. In this way a cycle of research-action-research is completed.     

Action Research: Its Nature and Validity

The process of knowledge acquisition which has the strongest truth claim is the research process of natural science, based on testing hypotheses to destruction. But the application of this process to phenomena beyond those for which it was developed, namely, the natural regularities of the physical universe, is problematical. For research into social phenomena there is increasing interest in action research in various forms. In this process the researcher enters a real-world situation and aims both to improve it and to acquire knowledge. This paper reviews the nature and validity of action research, arguing that its claim to validity requires a recoverable research process based upon a prior declaration of the epistemology in terms of which findings which count as knowledge will be expressed.     

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.     

Business Action Research in Practice—A Strategic Conversation About Conducting Action Research in Business Organizations

The objectiveof this paper is to provide practitioner researchers with insights into the initial findings around the challenges of conducting business action research in practice in commercial settings on the basis of experiences of a PhD cohort at Monash University in the first 18 months of candidature. In performing the role of a concluding paper, it sets out a generic framework for action research that the cohort has come to embrace. In doing so, it draws on emergent themes spread across the six diverse topics that are the subject of action research interventions of the cohort members. The paper then identifies and analyses the common patterns that have emerged and offers observations and conclusions for those involved in practitioner research.     

Some Common Ground That Can Provide a Basis for Collaboration Between Action Researchers and Scientists: A Philosophical Case That Works in Practice

By analysing 22 case studies of good research, both action research and agricultural science, I believe I have found some criteria of good research that is common to all of them. These criteria match the philosophical pragmatists argument that the best a researcher can do is to provide a warranted assertion from a methodology which is fit for the specific research purpose and is internally consistent. They also include Popper's requirement that a methodology needs to seek disconfirming evidence and Habermas's requirement that subjective data is important in all research. These criteria have provided me with a basis for collaboration with my scientific colleagues and can provide a basis for collaboration between other researchers, whatever their methodology.     

Researching-Acting-Reflecting on Public Health Services in Venezuela. I. A Conceptual Framework

This is the first of a duology of articles reporting on an action research project about public health services in Venezuela. This first paper presents a summary of a conceptual framework from which a process of intervention was launched. The second paper, which follows immediately in this special issue, presents a narrative of the intervention process and a final discussion about it. The conceptual framework is constituted by two types of interpretive models of the role of the state concerning health services. On the one hand, four logical interpretive models are summarized. They correspond to four theories about the socioeconomic mission of the state in a modern society. Different thematic interpretations concerning the role of the state in health services are derived from such general missions. On the other hand, two different and, to a certain degree, opposed historical interpretive models about the present Venezuelan socioeconomic-political situation and their corresponding power structures are outlined. The four logical interpretive models are discussed in the light of the two historical models in terms of desirable and feasible courses of political action.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

The scene for Interpretive Systemology

In this introductory paper to the special issue ofSystems Practice devoted to Interpretive Systemology, some of the conditions under which this trend in systems thinking has come to life are briefly depicted. For that purpose a wider and a narrower scene are presented. The wider scene presents the general questions and problems that are to be tackled by Interpretive Systemology, within a wide international perspective of systems thinking and practice. The narrower scene, which is related to more particular conditions, shows how some circumstances connected to the socalled Third World or underdeveloped countries have helped to trigger the launching of Interpretive Systemology. Finally, a brief outline of the research program for Interpretive Systemology is introduced.     

Power,Conflicts, and Resolutions: A Change Agent's Perspective on Conducting Action Research Within a Multiorganizational Partnership

Partnership has become the watchword of government policy over the past 10 years. It is a politically expedient solution to a wide range of complex public policy issues. Although examined in the literature from the viewpoint of an external observer, there has been relatively little examination of what it means to be working in a partnership from the inside. Based on experience as a change agent and action researcher working within a multiorganizational partnership, this paper considers the dilemmas and resolutions experienced in this role. The paper provides a first person reflective account of the inherent ethical, political, and personal turmoils and issues around multilevel dynamics, role ambiguity, power games, political entrepreneurship, and shadows of the past. The paper exposes the key learning points to emerge and concludes that change agents need good support mechanisms and bestowed power in order to challenge vested and powerful interests.     

When Research and Practice Collide: The Role of Action Research When There Is a Conflict of Interest with Stakeholders

This article discusses problematic aspects of the role of the action researcher when working with multiple stakeholders on a complex research project concerning regional development. The case presented here deals with the improvement of the regional innovation system in a small region in the south of Norway. The project resulted in a conflict between stakeholders and the action research (AR) team. We claim that when working in a regional context, the role of the action researcher is set to be a collaborator in a context of power play; the ultimate stakeholders must be defined as the citizens in that region. Therefore, in some situations the action researcher must have a legitimatised right to abandon collaboration and present a critical voice in the public deliberation. Strategic power play and strategic action by stakeholders represent a clear threat to the soft approach of collaboration, reflectivity, and democratic dialogue that AR represents. The ultimate challenge and obligation of the action researcher is to improve democracy in society in a long-term perspective through representing a critical capacity in the public deliberation.     

Cybernetics and Participation: From Theory to Practice

A combination of recent cybernetic discourse provides guidelines for reconsidering our way of thinking about the relationship between government and the governed. With reference to contemporary understanding of natural biological systems and complexity, it is possible to reformulate a language that has tended to be dominated by notions of competition and survival of the fittest. Instead we can perhaps move toward reconsidering social systems in terms of a more dynamic and equitable understanding of the fit and structural dance of different systems, and postulate that the motor for progress is the coexistence of difference rather than might over right. This paper synthesizes the somewhat different insights of Stafford Beer and the Santiago School of Cognition, and reports on a real-world initiative that sought to instantiate governance as a phenomenon constituted by the governed. Technological developments of the knowledge age are proposed as supporting such democratic initiatives.     

Environmental Paradigms,Biodiversity Conservation,and Critical Systems Thinking

In 1994 Gerald Midgley addressed the issue of the boundary implications of two different paradigms of thought about the environment, namely, humanis and the ecological perspective The distinction that he makes is important because it draws attention to the value implications of an uncritical acceptance of boundaries around human interests that serves to marginalize the environment. It is argued here, however, that Midgley does not go far enough. Just as an uncritical acceptance of humanis marginalizes the environment, so an uncritical acceptance of the environmental perspectiv runs the risk of prioritizing some elements of the environment over others, e.g., the interests of individual animals over species or over ecosystems. This paper seeks to correct this limitation in Midgleys account by developing a more sophisticated framework of environmental paradigms: a framework that can be used to clarify the values of stakeholders in critical systems interventions involving the management of biodiversity.     

Testament to conversations on critical systems thinking between two systems practitioners

This is a testament to conversations held in Berne and Fribourg, Switzerland, in late 1988. The main theme that we present concerns seeking to find an adequate epistemology for systems practice, to find a truly critical approach, by shifting our interests from systems science to systems rationality (i.e., by reaching out toward a systems epistemological ideal) and by dealing with sociological phenomena such as the effects of material conditions and false consciousness and inequalities associated with these. Social rationalities relating to positivism, interpretivism, and critique are considered. Limitations and legitimacies of these rationalities in social contexts are made explicit in these discussions.Conversations were held in Berne and Fribourg, Switzerland, between 30 November and 5 December 1988.     

Man–Machine Systems: People and Technology in OR

This paper provides an exploration of how different understandings of man–machine systems have accompanied developments in Operational Research. In particular, the paper will challenge the notion that we are in a position of mastery with respect to technology. Both Hard OR and Soft OR are criticized for a failure to examine adequately the relationship between people and technology. Toward the end of the paper a new way of understanding this relationship will be proposed in terms of technologies of the self or what Michel Foucault called ethics.     

“Becoming Different”: Accessing University From a Low Socioeconomic Community—Barriers and Motivators

Access to tertiary education by individuals from low socio-economic backgrounds has been extremely low historically, despite policies to address this inequity. Twenty eight people from a low socio-economic community with almost the lowest rates of access to university in Australia were interviewed to identify the barriers they had encountered and the factors that had enabled them to access and complete a university qualification. Barriers reported occur both within the community, and external to, or on the boundary of the community. Internal barriers included lack of information about the existence of university or its value for individuals, cultural beliefs about acceptable aspirations, a lack of role models within the community, and a lack of the opportunity to compare the impact of a university education on lifestyle, opportunities and options. Motivators identified are categorised as nature of work; interest, role models/comparisons competition/proving, and encouragement.     

Europe as a Knowledge Society: Integrating Universities,Corporations, and Government

Europe is introduced as a knowledge society, with an emphasis on the strategic role of European Commission Framework Programmes as central to the European Project. This introduces changes to traditional nationally based and discipline oriented approaches to the roles of universities, corporations, and governments, which are illustrated through the case of the Centre for Working Life research at Kingston Business School. It is argued that discussion of the new production of knowledge needs to be complemented by encouragement of participative action research.     

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.