Introduction to Action Research

Social Research for Social Change

Davydd James Greenwood, Morten Levin

• Editorial: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Año: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781483389370
• Edición: 2
• Categoría: Scienze sociali
• Categoría: Metodologia e ricerca nelle scienze sociali

The Second Edition of Introduction to Action Research: Social Research for Social Change makes social science matter! It focuses on how it is possible to combine practical problem solving with generating new theoretical insights. Authors Davydd J. Greenwood and Morten Levin combine a thorough discussion of the epistemological foundations of action research with a broad overview of major contemporary trends in the field. New to the Second Edition:

• Includes a vast amount of updated information: Nine chapters have been significantly updated, including two new chapters that engage readers into the current debates on action research as "tradition" or its own "methodology, " and how action research takes shape in the university environment. New textboxes highlight important issues in each chapter and more detailed cases and real-world examples illustrate the practical implications of AR in a variety of settings.
• Incorporates a new structure: New information pertains specifically to issues of techniques, work forms, and research strategies based on the authors' experiences in using the book in teaching. The book now has 4 parts instead of 3, with an entirely new section on higher education and democracy as a concluding section.
• Emphasizes the skill sets needed to do action research: This book deals with the process of educating action researchers and reviews a number of programs that do this. Specific attention is given to the challenges of writing and intellectual property in AR, and more focus is devoted to both adult and formal education, creating a comprehensive overview of the field that is not found in any other action research book.

Intended Audience:
This is an excellent textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate courses in Action Research, Social Research, and Qualitative Research across the social sciences.

Part 1

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What Is Action Research?

This book presents action research (AR) as a set of collaborative ways of conducting social research that simultaneously satisfies rigorous scientific requirements and promotes democratic social change. We introduce the reader to the epistemological and the technical issues raised by AR, and we paint a broad picture of the varieties of AR found around the globe. In Chapter 1 (“Introduction: Action Research, Diversity, and Democracy”), we introduce AR as a research strategy and reform practice. We view AR as a way of working in the field, of utilizing multiple research techniques aimed at enhancing change and generating data for scientific knowledge production. AR rests on processes of collaborative knowledge development and action design involving local stakeholders as full partners in mutual learning processes.

AR is a set of self-consciously collaborative and democratic strategies for generating knowledge and designing action in which trained experts in social and other forms of research and local stakeholders work together. The research focus is chosen collaboratively among the local stakeholders and the action researchers, and the relationships among the participants are organized as joint learning processes. AR centers on doing “with” rather than doing “for” stakeholders and credits local stakeholders with the richness of experience and reflective possibilities that long experience living in complex situations brings with it.

AR emerged from a variety of sources and gradually converged in a currently multidimensional strategy for social change. Because of the diversity of AR approaches, we seek in Chapter 2 (“A History of Action Research “) to provide a broad overview of the field as well as detailed in-depth arguments for AR. We posit that for many years AR has presented powerful arguments regarding the way the social sciences can and should operate but that this position has been both ideologically and institutionally suppressed. In our view, at present it is vitally important to show how AR can revitalize the social sciences, whose future seems to us increasingly in doubt because of the joint onslaughts of globalization, the commodity production view of knowledge generation and dissemination, and the reconstruction of universities as corporate industrial parks and vocational schools.

The major sources of AR are the original political economy tradition out of which the contemporary social sciences developed, American “pragmatic” philosophy, social and experimental psychology, community development and adult education, industrial democracy work, human inquiry, action science, action learning, reflective practice, participatory rural development, and liberation theology. What brings all these approaches together is the belief that there is no substitute for learning by doing.

One result of this is that cases and case narratives occupy a central place in the learning processes associated with becoming a competent AR practitioner. Therefore we end the first part of the book with the presentation in Chapter 3 (“Action Research Cases From Practice”) of three descriptions of AR cases to show the rich texture, the challenges, pitfalls, and possibilities. One case emerges out of Spanish experiences in the Mondragón cooperatives, another was located in a small village of western Norway, and the last takes place within the walls of Cornell University.

1

Introduction

Action Research, Diversity, and Democracy

Action research (AR) can help us build a better, freer, fairer society through collaborative problem analysis and problem solving in context. In this book, we offer a general overview of AR, including a comprehensive philosophical justification for it, a review of some commonly used methods, case examples to contextualize it, and a review of a variety of different approaches to AR praxis. Throughout, we advocate AR and its social change agenda vis-àvis other forms of social research that do not contribute as actively and directly to processes of democratic social change and the simultaneous creation of valid social knowledge.

Our advocacy rests on two distinct but related bases: democratic inclusion and social research quality. AR democratizes research processes through the inclusion of the local stakeholders as coresearchers. AR also produces better quality social research than that arising from professional expert social research strategies. Thus, AR is central to the enactment of a commitment to democratic social transformation through research, analysis, and action design.

Action Research Defined

Action research is social research carried out by a team that encompasses a professional action researcher and the members of an organization, community, or network (“stakeholders”) who are seeking to improve the participants’ situation. AR promotes broad participation in the research process and supports action leading to a more just, sustainable, or satisfying situation for the stakeholders.

Together, the professional researcher and the stakeholders define the problems to be examined, cogenerate relevant knowledge about them, learn and execute social research techniques, take actions,¹ and interpret the results of actions based on what they have learned. AR rests on the belief and experience that all people—professional action researchers included—accumulate, organize, and use complex knowledge continuously in everyday life. This belief is visible in any AR project because the first step professional action researchers and members of a community, organization, or network take is to define a problem that they seek to resolve. They begin by pooling their knowledge. AR democratizes the relationship between the professional researcher and the local interested parties.

Because it is a research practice with a social change agenda, AR involves a critique of conventional academic practices and organizations that assert either the necessity or desirability of studying social problems without trying to resolve them. Although AR views academic and professional knowledge systems that do not engage practice direction as wrongheaded, action researchers neither reject formal research methods nor ignore the epistemological issues that necessarily undergird the development of valid social knowledge. To the contrary, action researchers, precisely because the results will affect the lives of the stakeholders, have a profound interest in the validity of the generated knowledge. These issues are dealt with in greater detail throughout Part 2 of this book, particularly in Chapters 4, “An Epistemological Foundation for Action Research,” and Chapter 5, “Scientific Method and Action Research.”

Why General Overviews of Action Research Are Hard to Find

We decided to write a general overview of AR because of our experience with university students and practitioners encountering the subject for the first time. In our experience, students and novice practitioners generally lack access to a sufficiently comprehensive and balanced way to learn about the diverse origins, theories, methods, motives, and problems associated with this complex field. Although there is an extensive bibliography of works on AR, including a number of introductory works and a handbook that provide overviews of various approaches (we cite these throughout), we felt that another kind of general book is also needed. Existing works are compendia, focus on a particular variety of AR to the exclusion of others, or do not link the history, philosophy, and practice of AR to a sufficiently broad set of philosophical, scientific, and political issues. The present book tries to overcome some of these limitations.

Gaining such an overview of AR is difficult, in part because of the organization of AR praxis. Action researchers are found in social service agencies, nongovernmental organizations, international development agencies, planning departments, and industry and are spread around the disciplines in academic institutions (for example, education, planning, communications, social services, program evaluation, sociology, anthropology, organizational behavior). Almost nowhere in academia is there a “department” of action research. Rather, networks of colleagues from diverse disciplines share an interest in AR. One result is that AR practitioners have very little common knowledge, read different journals and books, and often write in ignorance of relevant contributions of others in AR from other fields.

We do not believe that creating a university department of AR is the answer to this dilemma. Indeed, we view the departmentalization of the social sciences as one of the ways in which the social reform agenda of the fields emerging from political economy in the 19th century was eliminated. However, we do not let academic institutions off the hook, and the final part of this book (Part 4) deals with these issues.

We want the reader to understand that what follows is not an overview of a discipline in the making. It is a presentation of a diverse and often divergent set of practices centered on putting social research to use for democratic social change. To that end, we try to include representation of many different approaches to AR and offer some references to allow readers to follow their own interests. What we include is limited by our own experience, our judgments of the different approaches we know about, and our own epistemological, methodological, and political agendas. Still, our goal is to give an honest and broad-minded presentation of the field of AR from our point of view. We are fully aware that the map is not the territory, and we know that knowledgeable AR practitioners will find gaps and idiosyncrasies in our choices.²

Action Research, Applied Research, and Qualitative Versus Quantitative Research

Action research refers to the conjunction of three elements: action, research, and participation. Unless all three elements are present, the process may be useful but it is not AR. Put another way, AR is a research strategy that generates knowledge claims for the express purpose of taking action to promote social analysis and democratic social change. The social change we refer to is not just any kind of change. AR aims to increase the ability of the involved community or organization members to control their own destinies more effectively and to keep improving their capacity to do so within a more sustainable and just environment.

AR is not applied research, and AR explicitly rejects the separation between thought and action that underlies the pure/applied distinction that has characterized social research for a number of generations. This theoretical/applied pseudo-split, in our view, has been a key mechanism by which the social sciences have become deformed. It creates a useless dance between disengaged theorists and engaged actors, a dance that liberates both sides from the need to generate valid understandings of the social world and its change processes and to hold themselves accountable to both meaningful social consequences and solid methodological and theoretical groundings.

We believe that valid social knowledge can only be derived from practical reasoning engaged in through action. As action researchers, we believe that action is the only sensible way to generate and test new knowledge. The widespread belief that being a “true” social scientist means not being engaged in social action is, to us, so peculiar and counterintuitive that we devote a considerable amount of space to explaining this phenomenon in Part 2 of this book.

We reject a widespread tendency for people to believe that AR must be qualitative research rather than quantitative research. This unjustifiable assumption probably arises from the belief that action-oriented work cannot be scientific (precisely because it involves action) and the additional assumption (erroneous in our view) that quantitative research must be more scientific than qualitative research. Because we see no merit in these assumptions and because we use both quantitative and qualitative methods ourselves, we reject the notion that AR is qualitative research only and argue that action researchers are obligated to be competent in all major forms of social research.

Action researchers can accept no a priori limits on the kinds of social research techniques they use. Surveys, statistical analyses, interviews, focus groups, ethnographies, and life histories are all acceptable, if the reason for deploying them has been agreed upon by the AR collaborators and if they are used in a way that does not oppress the participants. Knowing exactly how much heavy metal is in the groundwater somewhere may be as much a part of an AR project as knowing how people make sense of the future. Formal quantitative, qualitative, and mixed methods all are appropriate to differing situations.

Action, Research, and Participation

Despite the significant differences among AR practitioners and their life situations, we believe that several important commitments link most of us. AR is composed of a balance of three elements. If any one of the three is absent, then the process is not AR. This is not to say that all non-AR processes are meaningless but to distinguish AR from other kinds of research and application activities.

1. Action. AR is participatory because AR aims to alter the initial situation of the group, organization, or community in the direction of a more self-managing, liberated, and sustainable state. What is defined as a liberated state varies from one practitioner to another. Some use AR to create a kind of liberation through greater self-realization. Others emphasize more political meanings of liberation, and these vary among themselves regarding how strong a political liberation agenda they advocate. Still others believe that AR occurs in any kind of research activity in which there is participation by some members of the organization being studied. Although a few practitioners try to link AR and revolutionary praxis, by and large, AR practitioners are democratic reformers rather than revolutionaries.
2. Research. We believe in research, in the power and value of knowledge, theories, models, methods, and analysis. We believe that AR is one of the most powerful ways to generate new research knowledge.
3. Participation. We believe in participation, placing a strong value on democracy and control over one’s own life situations. These values permeate our arguments and create a strong general commitment to democratizing the knowledge generation process. AR involves trained social researchers who serve as facilitators and teachers of members of local communities or organizations. Because these people together establish the AR agenda, generate the knowledge necessary to transform the situation, and put the results to work, AR is a participatory process in which everyone involved takes some responsibility.

All these different approaches are further subdivided by the kinds of topics they deal with: community development, change in educational systems, economic development and liberation in the Third World, participatory change in core institutions of society (companies, administrative bureaucracies, and so on). Many of these different approaches to AR are incompatible. Some rest on Marxist notions of political economy and social transformation; others are rooted in pragmatic philosophy; still others build on a particular brand of social psychology; and a few simply advocate that, whatever the question, participation is the answer. We take seriously the obligation to make the reader aware of these differences, but we harbor no illusions about reconciling them.

Action Research, the Disciplines, and Coverage

As noted earlier, AR is not a discipline. It involves practitioners from anthropology, development studies, education, engineering, gender studies, human services, psychology, human services, social work, sociology, planning, civil engineering, and many other fields, including many forms of nonacademic practice. Consequently, students will not find AR presented in introductory disciplinary courses in most departments. Academic disciplines use introductory courses to recruit neophyte disciplinarians and to enhance enrollments to satisfy the demands of university administrations in return for which the departments get additional resources. These courses generally do not aim to attract scholars and practitioners who share particular views about democracy, participation, and the creation of useful knowledge. This is the case despite the fantasies of U.S. neoconservatives who imagine the social sciences and humanities in U.S. universities to be hotbeds for the promotion of left-wing ideologies.

In a higher education environment, AR is not an easy way to work, because disciplinary enrollments and boundaries are the tools used in academic competition and administrative command and control. Yet, we encounter increasing numbers of students from diverse fields who come to us to learn about AR. Some come in reaction to their unsatisfying experiences of the abstractions and social passivity of their home fields, others because of their rejection of the instrumentalism of many so-called applied fields, and still others because of their experiences with other approaches that are critical of “canonical” disciplinary systems (for example, feminism, neo-Marxism, critical theory). The teaching challenge with such heterogeneous groups is how to present an introduction to people who are searching for something, to provide them with enough background to permit them to continue learning about AR independently, and, at the same time, to build as directly as possible on the experiences that moved them to explore AR in the first place.

After thinking through this problem and teaching AR courses over the past 20 years, we decided that the best approach is for us to develop a consistent historical, philosophical, and ethical argument for AR, provide some cases of AR practice, and then introduce a variety of AR approaches. To fulfill the conditions of this design, we develop a philosophical argument for AR as sc...