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CHOICE AND QUALITY IN ACTION RESEARCH
PRACTICE
Peter Reason
Keynote address
ALARPM 6th World Congress
PAR 10th World Congress
Whenever
I talk about action research, I want to assert a fundamental message: in its
full articulation, action research is a way of living. There is, in the end, no difference between
good action research and living a good life. So in a first-person sense, Judi Marshall writes about living life as
inquiry (Marshall, 1999, 2001, 2002); Bill Torbert about bring inquiry into
more and more aspects of our lives (Torbert, 2001). In a wider second- and third-person sense,
we can see action research as helping develop learning organizations,
communities of inquiry within communities of action and wider networks of
inquiry and ‘social movements’ (Gustavsen, 2003). It is often pointed out that
the findings of traditional social science are of little or no use to members
of organizations or practitioners (e.g. Susman & Evered, 1978). The
division between academic life and the everyday was forged at the time of the
European Enlightenment, for very good reasons at that time (Toulmin,
1990). I think it is very important to hold to the idea that action research is
one way to break down this barrier between living an inquiring life and
research in a formal sense, and to see inquiry as part of a well-lived life,
and of a healthy organization and society. So I love this quote from the great
American playwright, Arthur Miller:
There is hardly a week
that passes when I don’t ask the unanswerable question: what am I now convinced
of that will turn out to be ridiculous?
And yet one can’t forever stand on the shore; at some point, filled with
indecision, skepticism, reservation and doubt, you either jump in or concede
that life is forever elsewhere.
This means that action research is an attitude toward inquiry, not just
a methodology. As Marja-Liisa Swantz puts it:
I do not separate my scientific inquiry from my life. For me it is really a quest for life, to understand life and to create what I call living knowledge— knowledge which is valid for the people with whom I work and for myself.
And
our purpose, as Orlando Fals Borda
puts it, is to ‘understand better, change, and re-enchant our plural world’ (Fals Borda, 2001:31). This
applies as a social, as well as a personal level, as Robin McTaggart
puts it:
The aim of participatory action research is to change practices, social structures, and social media which maintain irrationality, injustice, and unsatisfying forms of existence.
What,
then, is good action research? What do we mean by quality in action
research? (I want to avoid the term
‘validity’, with its reference back to positivist research which and suggest
that there is one validity). If we hold
firmly to this notion of engagement, with practice, with in some sense doing
things better, what are the dimensions of quality? One traditional answer is that action
research addresses social issues in a practical fashion and also makes a
contribution to theory. But this is
unsatisfactory, because it continues the separation of theory from practice,
and is a justification for action research in an orthodox academic perspective.
If we
start from the idea that creating knowledge is a practical affair, we will
start not, as in traditional academic research from an interesting theoretical question,
but from what concerns us in practice, from the presenting issues in our
lives. As Richard Rorty puts it:
We cannot regard truth as a goal of inquiry. The purpose of inquiry is to achieve agreement among human beings about what to do, to bring consensus on the end to be achieved and the means to be used to achieve those ends. Inquiry that does not achieve co-ordination of behaviour is not inquiry but simply wordplay. (Rorty, 1999:xxv)
And
as Paulo Freire put it so clearly:
The starting point…must be the present, existential, concrete situation, reflecting the aspirations of the people… [We] must pose this existential, concrete, present situation to the people as a problem which challenges them and requires a response—not just at an intellectual level, but at a level of action. (Freire, 1970:85)
But
does this mean that action research is simply about what works? I think not.
Another aspect of seeing action research as a process of everyday life
is Torbert’s notion of ‘a kind of research/practice
open in principle to anyone willing to commit to integrating inquiry and
practice in everyday personal and professional settings’ (Reason & Torbert, 2001:7). But as
Torbert points out, it is all very well to think that each moment of action
might also be a moment of inquiry, but in practice most of us rarely remember
that this is so and if we do remember we find the practice impossibly difficult
(Torbert, 2001:250). In consequence, so we habitually act in ways that are
unilateral, and which do not generate more effective information for ourselves
other actors.
And
more formally, when as a journal editor I am offered a paper which describes
and reflects on a piece of action research, what criteria should I be using to
judge the quality of the paper, and behind and beyond that the quality of the
engagement it is trying to tell me about?
In
the Handbook of Action Research,
Hilary Brabury and I developed model articulating five dimensions of action
research (Reason & Bradbury, 2001). We described action research as
…a participatory, democratic process concerned with developing practical knowing in the pursuit of worthwhile human purposes… It seeks to bring together action and reflection, theory and practice, in participation with others, in the pursuit of practical solutions to issues of pressing concern to people, and more generally the flourishing of individual persons and their communities. (Reason & Bradbury, 2001:1)
We
portray as in the five dimensions in the Figure 1.
Figure 1 about here
Part
of our purpose was to show the range of questions that action researchers may
need to address, and to try to begin to suggest the different criteria against
which quality in inquiry might be judged.
When you look at the processes in this way, you can see that what
characterizes action research is the enormous range of choices that are open to
you. So a key dimension of quality is to
be aware of the choices, and to make those choices clear, transparent,
articulate, to your selves, to your inquiry partners, and, when you start
writing and presenting, to the wider world.
As we wrote in the editorial documents for the new journal Action Research:
One might therefore say that the primary ‘rule’ in approaching quality with our practice of action research is to be aware of the choices one is making and their consequences. We need our concern for quality to move from 'policing' to stimulating dialogue. Thus in considering how we approach questions of quality in action research for the journal, we suggest as a first principle that the author explicitly address the qualities they believe relevant to their work and the choices they have made in their work. (Action Research editorial guidelines: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/resources/actionresearch.htm)
We
also wanted to stimulate a developing debate about quality, and so we have
asked contributors to connect their choices to the developing literature:
However, since there is also considerable scholarship about the nature of quality both in action research and more broadly in critical, constructionist and qualitative inquiry, we might suggest also that the authors explicitly connect their own judgments to discussions in current literature. (Action Research editorial guidelines: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/resources/actionresearch.htm)
I
want now to explore each of these five dimensions in terms of the choices they
offer and comment on some of the quality issues that concern me at present.
Practical knowing
A primary purpose of action research is to produce practical knowledge that is useful to people in the everyday conduct of their lives. A wider purpose of action research is to contribute through this practical knowledge to the increased well-being—economic, political, psychological, spiritual—of human persons and communities, and to a more equitable and sustainable relationship with the wider ecology of the planet of which we are an intrinsic part. (Reason & Bradbury, 2001:2)
For
the first issue of the journal I wrote a paper exploring the relevance of
Richard Rorty’s brand of pragmatism for action research (Reason, 2003). Rorty argues that among the things that get
in the way of creating a just and open society are the dualisms that dominate
our thinking, including that between reality and appearance. This misleads us into an attempt to find the
‘truth’ corresponding with a intrinsic nature of reality, when the task of
inquiry should be that of human problem solving:
Pragmatists hope to break with the picture which, in Wittgenstein’s words, ‘holds us captive’—the Cartesian-Lockean picture of a mind seeking to get in touch with a reality outside itself. So they start with a Darwinian account of human beings as animals doing their best to cope with the environment—doing their best to develop tools which will enable them to enjoy more pleasure and less pain. Words are among the tools which these clever animals have developed. (Rorty, 1999:xxii-xxiii)
Rorty’s
view is that ‘No organism, human or non-human, is ever more or less in touch
with reality’, it is a Cartesian error to think of the mind as somehow swinging
free of the causal forces exerted on the body. So we should give up seeing
inquiry as a means of representing reality, and rather see it as a means of
using reality. The relationship between
truth claims and the world becomes ‘causal rather than representational’ and
the issue becomes whether our beliefs ‘provide reliable guides to getting what
we want’ (1999:33).
Thus
one question we can ask about action research is whether it does ‘provide
reliable guides to what we want’. The
practical issues addressed in action research projects at
·
How
to help communities respond to disaster such as random shootings, train
crashes, terrorist attack;
·
How
to increase patient choice in an out-patient clinic;
·
How
to improve professional practice: how can I as a teacher can improve my
classroom practice, I as a manager discover more appropriate forms of
management;
·
How
Black women can thrive rather than simply survive in
·
And
so on
The
kinds of practice concerns at the heart of action research are expressed by
Geoff Mead as he starts his inquiry into leadership in the police service:
Improving the quality of leadership is a crucial issue for the police service. Learning about theories of leadership is not enough. What really matters is for each of us to understand and improve our own unique practice as leaders. (Mead, 2001:191)
But
the question of providing reliable guides to what we want is actually rather
complex, because it immediately raises issues such as who it is that defines
what we want; whether we know what we want; and whether what we want is
actually good for us. I want to explore two particular critiques.
My
colleague Judi Marshall has drawn on Bakan’s
distinction between agency and communion (Bakan,
1966; Marshall, 1984)
Bakan proposes agency and communion as…basic coping strategies for dealing with the uncertainties and anxieties of being alive. Agency is the expression of independence through self-protection, self-assertion and self-expansion; communion seeks union and cooperation as it way of coming to terms with uncertainty. Whilst agency manifests itself in focus, closedness and separation, communion is characterized by contact, openness and union. The tendencies are potential complements rather than alternatives (but their very splitting conceptually is a product of the agency feature). (Marshall, 1984:65)
There
are significant parallels between this description of agency and communion and
the kinds of ‘women’s ways of knowing’ described by Belenky
and her colleagues (Belenky, Clinchy,
Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986).
As
Richard Tarnas argues so well (Tarnas, 1991) the dominant thrust of western
thought and practice has been agentic: the project to create an ‘autonomous
rational human self’, an ‘autonomous human will and intellect’. This has been
an essentially masculine project ‘founded on the repression of the feminine’
(pp 441-2), on the repression of communion in Marshall and Bakan’s
terms. The consequences of this one-sided, agentic consciousness has been, to
borrow Skolimowski’s phrase, ‘ecological
devastations, human and social fragmentation, spiritual impoverishment’
(Skolimowski, 1985:22).
Gregory
Bateson, in Conscious Purpose versus
Nature and other essays (in Bateson, 1972), argues that a natural
ecosystem, such as an English oak forest, is made up of many creatures all of
which individually have the capacity for exponential grown in population. The
balance of such ecosystems is maintained by the circuits of information that
maintain an uneasy balance between dependence and competition amongst the
constituent species. Bateson saw these
information flows as the immanent Mind which holds the wisdom of the whole. The
integrity of a human person or community is maintained in a similar way, by
complex processes of information feedback which are not accessible to
consciousness. He points out that ‘the
whole of mind could not be reported in a part of the mind’ (p. 432) and
therefore consciousness is relatively limited. However, it is this limited
consciousness that selects what is worth attending—that which is relevant to my
conscious purposes:
If you allow purpose to organize that which comes under your conscious inspection, what you will get is a bag of tricks—some of them very valuable tricks…but we do not know two-penn’orth, really, about the total network systems… Wisdom I take to be the knowledge of the larger interactive system—that system which, if disturbed, is likely to generate exponential curves of change
Consciousness operates [by] sampling of the events and process of the body and what goes on in the total mind. It is organized in terms of purpose. It is a short-cut device to get you what you quickly at what you want; not to act with maximum wisdom in order to live, but to follow the shortest logical or causal path to get what you next want, which may be dinner; it may be a Beethoven sonata; it may be sex. Above all, it may be money or power. (Bateson, 1972:409)
What I
am cautioning against here is a purely pragmatic view of action research as
solving problems: if the ‘action’ in ‘action research’ tempts us to become hegemonically agentic—and there will always be a temptation
for this to be so, particularly when we are bidding for funding and attempting
to respond to the urgently experienced problems of managers and
politicians. We may wish to temper this
agency with communion, but Judi Marshall, reflecting on the complementarity
of agency and communion, speculates this may be the wrong way round. On the
basis of studies with women managers, she wonder if ‘communion… twinned with a
more or less fully developed agentic auxiliary… is more viable than the
alternative pairing of dominant agency with auxiliary communion’ (Marshall,
1984:72).
The
key quality questions here seem to be on the one hand
·
Does
the inquiry lead to more effective practice in the world leading to those
involved doing things better?
While
on the other hand
·
Is
this concern for practice well embedded in wider concerns? Is attention paid to the external effects
created by this action? Is the shadow
acknowledged and honoured?
So I
think the ‘action’ in action research refers not just to the practical
outcomes, the doing things differently, and applies to all the dimensions of
action research. They are all forms of
action, all dimensions of practice, all knowledge in action. So while concrete
practical concerns will be the starting point, the whole business of doing
action research is practice, and our sense of quality must reach wider than
simply ‘does it work?’. That I think
gets us away from an heroic, masculine vision of action research: it is not
just about heroic doing, it is about something more subtle and inclusive than
that.
This
leads me to the second dimension of action research.
Democracy and participation
In
the Handbook of Action Research we
argued that building democratic, participative, pluralist communities of inquiry
is central to the work of action research; that action research is only
possible with, for and by persons and communities (Reason & Bradbury,
2001:2). Similar arguments can be found throughout the action research
literature (for example in Fals Borda
& Rahman, 1991; Greenwood & Levin, 1998;
Heron, 1996; Kemmis, 2001). Many practices of action research give voice
directly to this dimension: participatory action research (Fals
Borda & Rahman, 1991),
co-operative inquiry (Heron & Reason, 2001), public conversations
(http://www.publicconversations.org/), dialogue conferences (Gustavsen, 2001)
and so on.
As Anisur Rahman pointed out at the Ballarat Congress, in a very worrying world,
…one positive force has also advanced, which is the awareness of democracy, human rights and social and ecological justice. Totalitarianism, where it still reigns or raises its head today, does so without any pretence of righteousness, and the ‘voice of the people’ when it expresses itself anywhere claims an intrinsic legitimacy. Human rights—including women’s rights—movements as well as movements for environment care are being more assertive than ever before. (Rahman, in press 2003)
Rahman suggested that a ‘deeper
meaning of democracy is being sought’ and that an important task for grassroots
activism as well as for action research is
…to help promote the empowerment of people—the subaltern, underprivileged, oppressed people—toward their democratic participation and voice in society for realizing their human urges as well as to enhance their contribution to and involvement in the search for deeper articulation of an ideological vision of a more humane world. (Rahman, in press 2003)
These
concerns about a deeper meaning of democracy are closely linked with action
research. I very much like Stephen Kemmis’
formulation, that
“The first step in action research turns out to be central: the formation of a communicative space”…and to do so in a way that will permit people to achieve mutual understanding and consensus about what to do, in the knowledge that the legitimacy of any conclusions and decisions reached by participants will be proportional to the degree of authentic engagement of those concerned. (Kemmis, 2001:100)
This
formation of communicative space is in itself a form of action. It may well be
that the most important thing we can try to do in certain situations if to
open, develop, maintain, encourage new and better forms of communication and
dialogue.
·
Action
research projects may open space for communication and dialogue where there was
none before creating space for muted and silenced voices (McArdle, 2002); or
where there are no forums for democratic dialogue (Gustavsen, 2001)
·
Action
Research projects may aim to improve and develop the quality of communication
and dialogue to create more effective communities of inquiry (Fisher, Rooke, & Torbert, 2000; Torbert, 1999)
·
Action
research may aim to develop a longer term capacity for democratic dialogue, to
build institutions
This
is not the place to discuss in detail the skills and practices of democratic
action, but the following issues seem important.
Taking
time.
Creating democratic spaces takes enormous amounts of time and care. It is easy to bandy about words like
participation, and these days some funding bodies like them. But the process of drawing people together
and creating a framework for collaborative work always takes longer than one
imagines. At times building
collaboration will seem to get in the way of directly addressing practical
problems.
Working
against denial.
Where the issues are significant and profoundly difficult to address, there
will be quite active processes of denial which make it very difficult to
sustain conversations. My colleague at
Bath Elizabeth Capewell, working with communities which have experienced
significant disaster (such as random shootings, major train or aircraft crashes
or terrorist acts) finds that there is a strong tendency for people to deny the
extent of the trauma and try to get ‘back to normal’ as possible; they often
claim that their community is strong, that the children are resilient, and will
recover naturally. This acts against any
moves to open up spaces for dialogue and represses discussion of the impact of
the disaster.
Errors
of consensus collusion.
Participation can have a shadow side in that human persons in primary
association can band together in defence of their version of reality and refuse
to countenance alternatives.
Tensions
in facilitation.
There is a constant and fascinating tension between the organizing ability and
facilitation skills of an outsider—a professional action researcher, a
community organizer, an animateur—and
the community that is there to be helped.
The outside facilitator is always in danger of ‘helping’ in a way that is
not helpful because it is controlling or patronizing or suffocating, or just
doesn’t understand. Community is always in danger of irrationally rejecting the
outsider or of becoming over dependent.
For this reason action research facilitators must follow disciplines of
reflective practice and carefully monitor their practice.
The
limitations of first order democracy. Ken Gergen (2003) makes a useful
distinction between first and second order democracy. First order democracy
brings together groups of people who share a sense of identity in effective
co-ordination about issues of common significance. While it is vital of importance, first order
democracy has degenerative as well as generative qualities, and every movement
in a generative direction creates grounds for degeneration (p. 50): every step
which creates a sense of ‘us’ can create a sense of ‘them’, and the potential
for alienation and hostility. Explorations of second order democracy are
required to counter this.
First order democracy is essentially achieved by those processes of meaning making that bring into being the disparate voices of the culture. However, such first order processes do not seem adequate to the challenge of confronting the second order problem of conflicting traditions of meaning. The discourses of the real and the good that sustain any particular tradition, seem ill suited to the task of hammering out a rationale for mutual viability. The discourse of creating identity boundaries is not adequate to the challenge of crossing boundaries. Alternative forms of discourse are required, second order intelligibilities and actions that enable us to soften the edges of otherwise embittered and embattled traditions. (Gergen, 2003:52)
In a
related manner, Bjørn Gustavsen argues that action
research will be of limited influence if we think only in terms of single
cases, and that we need to think of creating social movements, which he sees as
events interconnected in a broader stream (Gustavsen, 2003).
The
challenge, therefore, is to find ways in which the reflective practice of
first-person inquiry and the first order democracy of the face to face group
with wider political processes. (Reason, in preparation 2003).
In
summary, my point in this section is threefold.
·
First
of all, the creation, development and maintenance of democratic dialogue and
the establishment of institutions for democratic inquiry are forms of action in
their own right. The establishment of
democratic dialogue may well be a far more important and compelling purpose in
an action research initiative than the addressing of immediate practical
problems.
·
Second,
the establishment of participation in a world increasingly characterized by
alienation and individualism is both far more urgent and far more complex than
we allow ourselves to believe. We need
to keep deepening our understanding of what we are up to.
·
Third,
we must continue the debate about the relationship between the face-to-face
democracy of an inquiry group and it relationships to the wider issues of creating
more democratic societies.
Reflections
on quality in action research must therefore include careful exploration of the
qualities of dialogue and participation that are needed in a particular
situation, and careful and in depth exploration of the processes of
establishment and development of such dialogue. We need many more detailed and
careful descriptions of the choices action research practitioners are.
There
is one other issue I want to raise here.
When we think of democracy we usually think about our relations with
other human persons and groups. From a
deep ecology perspective (Berry, 1999; Devall &
Sessions, 1985; Macy, 1991) the human community is an ordinary member of the
wider community of beings which make up the biosphere. We clearly have a long way to go before we
learn to participate with each other, but if we don’t also see ourselves as
participants in the ecology of the planet as a whole we will continue to
devastate our living space. As Gregory
Bateson put it, if you don’t see yourself as part of the wider whole, if you
arrogate all mind to yourself, your chance of survival will be that of a
snowball in hell (Bateson, 1972:436-437).
In this sense participation, learning to see ourselves as part of the
whole, is an ecological imperative
Ways of knowing
One
of the traditional claims of action research is that it addresses practical
issues while also making a contribution to knowledge. ‘Knowledge’ in this sense
can be taken to mean the propositional, abstract theorizing of academia. But
many action researchers argue that their work is based on ways of knowing that
go beyond the orthodox empirical and rational Western epistemology, and which
start from a relationship between self and other, through participation and
intuition (see, for example, Belenky et al., 1986;
Heron, 1996; Park, 2001; Torbert, 1991).
These many ways of knowing:
…assert the importance of sensitivity and attunement in the moment of relationship, and of knowing not just as an academic pursuit but as the everyday practices of acting in relationship and creating meaning in our lives. (Reason & Bradbury, 2001:9)
In
our work at Bath we tend to draw on the formulation of John Heron, who
articulates ‘many ways of knowing’ in a fourfold ‘extended epistemology’: experiential knowing is through direct
face-to-face encounter with a person, place or thing; it is knowing through
empathy and resonance, that kind of in-depth knowing which is almost impossible
to put into words; presentational knowing
grows out of experiential knowing, and provides the first form of
expression through story, drawing, sculpture, movement, dance, drawing on
aesthetic imagery; propositional knowing draws
on concepts and ideas; and practical
knowing consummates the other forms of knowing in action in the world.
(Heron, 1992, 1996). I want to use these
formulations to explore some of the quality dimensions and choices that may
arise here, building an argument that each of these ways of knowing implies
both a different challenge to quality and offers ways of countering that
challenge.
Experiential
knowing
The
notion of experiential knowing implies we somehow go beyond our initial
conceptions and open ourselves to ‘deeper’ perspectives: we ‘participate in the
being of what is present’ to borrow Heron’s phrase, or in the language of
phenomenology we bracket our preconceptions.
One of our graduates, Angela Brew, suggested in her PhD that quality
inquiry would follow the maxim ‘if you think you understand, look again’ (Brew,
1988): if we don’t open ourselves to the
possibility of new perspectives, how can we claim we are inquiring?
Among
the doctoral dissertations at Bath are three by Black women who have engaged in
personal and participative inquiries into the experience of women like
themselves in British organizations (Bravette, 2001;
Bryan, 2000; Douglas, 1999). They have
all involved deep reflection on what it is to be Black in British culture,
upsetting preconceptions of all those involved. Carlis Douglas posed the
question,
The issues that face us all are not just how to survive—obviously we are doing that somehow, but how to thrive—thrive with some passion, some compassion, some humour and some style. (Douglas, 2002:250)
Her
inquiries included in-depth reflection on her personal experience and
behaviour, an intense co-operative inquiry with a group of Black women, and
participative engagement and education with a wide range of women in
organizations as part of her professional practice in race relations. Her research was based on the assumption that
oppressed groups
…develop a sophisticated level of skill at…detecting discrimination in its more subtle forms within interpersonal transactions… We collect this information through our senses and then hold the knowing within ourselves as feelings. In some instances we are able to translate these feelings into conceptual knowledge that gives insights into the ways in which our oppression is maintained. But often this translation work is not done, and nevertheless we walk around potent with this knowledge. (Douglas, 2002:250)
One
task of inquiry, therefore, was to explore and articulate this tacit
knowledge. But the exploration of this
experiential knowing was deeply challenging. Without in any way minimizing the
racist quality of UK culture, in her first person inquiries, Carlis had
…uncovered ways in which my survival strategies colluded in maintaining my oppression rather than in negotiating my liberation, [and] I had experienced feelings of vulnerability and of being de-skilled. (Douglas, 2002:252)
The
inquiry group
…generated great insights into the challenges for us as Black women wanting to not only survive but to thrive. It connected our subjective and objective ‘knowings’ about the many ways in which we unintentionally collude in the complex process by which many of the groups with which we most closely identify are kept excluded from the benefits of the system and disadvantaged. (Douglas, 2002:251)
As
one member commented, ‘if we hadn’t had the group we wouldn’t have known what
questions to ask’
Carlis’
work is a particularly clear example of the significance of in-depth encounter
with experience in inquiry process, ‘looking again’ at experience even when
this is painful and disturbs well-established survival strategies. But our experience at Bath is that all really
good inquiry is disturbing in some way, and that all our graduate students and
many of their co-researchers experience some kind of crisis in their sense of
who they are and their relationships with others in the course of their
inquiry.
We
have long advocated personal development work—psychotherapy, martial arts,
meditation and so on—as a way for individuals to build their capacity to learn from
the challenges that arise in experiential inquiry. We have begun a more systematic inquiry into
the ways in which mindfulness disciplines of Buddhist meditation may aid the
practice of inquiry. It seems to us that
while it is difficult to make direct links, we can describe these as as providing a foundational
discipline for inquiry: an underlying quality of quiet mind, a capacity for
less attachment to personal identity, and an ability to notice self concern and
the manipulations of ego.
If we
see mindfulness practice as foundational for first-person inquiry, we might see
a range of practices that develop learning communities that are both supportive
and challenging—group dialogue (Isaacs, 1999), circle groups (Baldwin, 1996),
public conversations etc—as foundational disciplines in second person
inquiry. And maybe in third-person
research we can see foundational disciplines not only in the everyday practices
of democracy, but more radically in the Truth and Reconciliation processes
pioneered in S Africa, and the initiatives to create conversations between
Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland and Israelis and Palestinians in
the Middle East.
Presentational
knowing
As
Bruner puts it,
…we come to experience the ‘real world’ in a manner that fits the stories we tell about it (Bruner, 2002:103)
He
appeals for many stories to be told; misquoting Tennyson, we might say ‘Lest
one good story should corrupt the world’.
Richard
Rorty takes a similar view, pointing to the contingency of the language that we
use, it is not possible to arrive a objective criteria for one choice of
vocabulary to describe events over another: the difference between what is
taken as ‘literal’ and what is taken as ‘metaphorical’ is the distinction
between the familiar and the unfamiliar vocabularies and theories
(1989:17). So when we want to argue
persuasively for a new view of phenomena, we are caught in a ‘contest between
an entrenched vocabulary which has become a nuisance and a half-formed
vocabulary which vaguely promises great things’ (1989:9; see also Reason,
2003).
This
leads to the key notion of redescription: ‘a talent
for speaking differently, rather than for arguing well, is the chief instrument
for cultural change’ (1989:7),
The…‘method’ of philosophy is the same as the ‘method’ of utopian politics or revolutionary science… The method is to redescribe lots and lots of things in new ways, until you have created a pattern of linguistic behaviour which will tempt the rising generation to adopt it… it says things like ‘try thinking of it this way’. (Rorty, 1989:9).
This
applies to all forms of human inquiry.
In a recent co-operative inquiry with young women in management in a
multinational company, group members reflected on their experience of being
snubbed, criticised and ignored when making presentations. At first, they saw what was happening to them
in terms of their own inadequacies but through the inquiry process learned to
‘redescribe’ this as ‘bullying’. And when further they placed this within a
wider context of the culture of the organization as based on values of winning
rather than values of inquiry, they are beginning to create a new vocabulary
(redescribing lots and lots of thing) which has implications for cultural
change. It is not a question, Rorty
would say, of whether ‘bullying’ corresponds to ‘the way things really are’;
rather it is a question of whether it is useful because it invites us to stop
feeling and doing some things and start feeling and doing others. As they learned to tell new stories of their
experience, they were able to stop feeling frustrated and powerless. They were able to tell themselves different
stories about their managers’ behaviour, narratives that were not offered by
the organizational culture, and by responding differently they were able to
shift how they were treated in the future (McArdle, 2002, in preparation;
McArdle & Reason, 2003).
Propositional
knowing
Styhre, Kohn and Sundgren
(2002) suggest that theoretical practices must be seen as part of action
research. After reviewing the critical,
post-colonial, feminist and management theorists they write
…theory is a means for breaking with the common sense thinking that prevails in everyday life in terms of gender, sex, race and ethnicity. For feminist and pos-colonial theorists, one cannot argue against common-sense thinking through its own means… As a consequence, theory becomes a liberating force, a medium that can formulate alternative perspectives, ideas, worldviews, and beliefs… not only a matter of verified hypotheses and scientific statements about the worlds… it… can transfer the world into something new… uproots old taken for granted beliefs and establish new topics on the agenda (Styhre et al., 2002:101)
Developing
alterative theories critical of everyday common sense grows out of in-depth
examination of experience and new narratives.
One of the most significant social movement in out times has been
feminism (although currently somewhat out of fashion). The work of feminism was grounded in
re-examining experience and telling new stories in consciousness raising
groups, but out of this new theories were fashioned by writers such as Carol
Gilligan, Kate Millett, Riane
Eisler—new theories of gender, of power, of
individual and social development.
In
current times one of the most important pieces of re-theorizing is taking place
in the ‘new economics’ movement (Robertson, 1998) and the global protest
against neo-liberal capitalism in the World Social Forums
(http://www.wsfindia.org/). There is
good evidence that the current domination of world affairs by ‘liberal’
economic theory and neo-conservatism is the outcome of an intentional and well
funded propaganda exercise (Houtart & Polet, 2001; Madron & Jopling, 2003). The
clear development and articulation of alternative economic theory and
institutional arrangements for justice and sustainability is essential if we
are to counter the devastating consequences of unbridled liberal capitalism.
At a maybe
more abstract level, but having a profound impact on how we create our world,
is the legacy of Enlightenment thinking, in particular the way it creates
dualisms, either/or, good/ bad, superior/subordinate relations—and of course
the fundament dualism between subject and object.
This worldview channels our thinking and perception in two important ways. It tells us that that the world is made of separate things. These objects of nature are composed of inert matter, and operate according to causal laws. They have no subjectivity, consciousness or intelligence, no intrinsic purpose, value and meaning. And it tells us that mind and physical reality are separate. Humans, and humans alone, have the capacity for rational thought and action and for understanding and giving meaning to the world. This split between humanity and nature, and the abrogation of all mind to humans, was what Weber meant by the disenchantment of the world.
The disenchantment of the world is also the disenchantment of the human person, which the modern worldview sees as autonomous, individual, calculating homo economicus, separate not only from the natural world but from our fellow humans. (Reason, 2002)
In my
own efforts to articulate an alternative I have emphasized the idea of
participation, that we are participants with each other and with all beings on
the planet. I find systemic thinking,
ecology and Gaia theory and Buddhist theory and practice helpful in
articulating this:
We participate in our world, so that the "reality" we experience is a co-creation that involves the primal givenness of the cosmos and human feeling and construing. ..
A participatory worldview places human persons and communities as part of their world—both human and more-than-human—embodied in their world, co-creating their world. It is itself situated and reflexive, is explicit about the perspective from which knowledge is created, sees inquiry as a process of coming to know, and which serves the democratic, practical ethos of action research. (Reason & Bradbury, 2001:7)
Practical
knowing
Traditional
academic thinking has difficulty with the notion of practical knowing, because,
as Rorty argues, it is still attached to the idea of theory as representing the
world. If we give up the idea of
knowledge is an attempt to represent reality,
and view inquiry as a way of using reality, as I argued earlier, the
relationship between truth claims and the rest of the world is causal rather
than representational, and the issue becomes whether our beliefs provide reliable
guides to getting what we want.
This
view is of course very close to that of action research, and I would suggest
that it here that the systematic qualities of action research come into play.
Action research is often described as the cycles of action and reflection: the
purpose of these cycles is to check our claims against what actually happens,
to ask questions such as, ‘Does it work?’, ‘Do we have evidence to support our
claims?’. Chris Argyris has made great
play of the differences between espoused theories and theories in use, and
proposes ways in which these can be more congruent (Argyris, Putnam, &
Smith, 1985); my colleague Jack
Whitehead is forever asking our students to provide the evidence to support
their claims (Whitehead, 2000); there are many techniques available to help us
explore our practice systematically, such as the two-column conversation and
the learning pathways grid (Rudolph, Taylor, & Foldy,
2001).
In
summary
This
brief exploration of different ways of knowing suggests that different ways of
knowing will have characteristic threats to quality, which can be addressed in
specific ways.
The
potential error in experiential knowing
is to be trapped in illusion, to create a defensive inquiry which guards
against the discovery of the new.
Quality inquiry will courageously seek ways of challenging
preconceptions and deepening contact with experience. It may draw on a variety of experiential
methods to enable individuals and groups to bracket preconceptions and defences
and open new perspectives. Foundational
practices can build individual and group capacities for less defensive openness
to experience.
The
potential error in presentational knowing
is to stay with the same old stories, to repeat them to oneself and to others
so they recreate existing realities and confirm existing beliefs. Quality inquiry will actively experiment with
redescription and draw on narrative practices to turn
stories upside down and tell them in new ways.
The
potential error in propositional knowing is
to be held within the hegemonic paradigm and uncritical acceptance of taken for
granted theories (and its identical opposite, the uncritical acceptance of the
currently fashionable oppositional position!).
Quality inquiry will engage accepted theory critically and forge new
theoretical perspectives.
The
potential error in practical knowing is
the failure to empirically test practices against outcomes. Quality action research will engage
systematically in cycles of action and reflection, provide adequate evidence to
test claims, and use a range of critical techniques to congruence of practice
against purpose
Worthwhile
purposes
The
fourth dimension of action research we considered in the Handbook was that it is intended to contribute to the flourishing
of human persons, communities, and the ecosystems of which we are part. This raises questions of values, morals, and
ethics. When Hilary and I were finishing putting the Handbook together, we realized that very few of our contributors
actively attended to inquiry into what is worthwhile: most simply assumed that
what they thought was good, was good! But as Rorty points out moral choice is
‘always a matter of compromise between competing goods rather than a choice
between absolutely right and wrong’ (Rorty, 1999:xxvii-xxix). If we accept
this, we need to be continually asking about what are worthwhile purposes, and
when what we currently think is worthwhile is interrupted by another claim. But there can be never be a clear and
ultimate answer:
When the question ‘useful for what?’ is pressed, [pragmatists] have nothing to say except ‘useful to create a better future’. When they are asked ‘Better by what criterion?’ they have no detailed answer… [they] can only say something as vague as: Better in the sense of containing more of what we consider good and less of what we consider bad. When asked ‘And what exactly do you consider good?’ pragmatists can only say, with Whitman, ‘variety and freedom’ or, with Dewey, ‘growth’.
They are limited to such fuzzy and unhelpful answers because what they hope is
not that the future will conform to a plan, will fulfil an immanent teleology…
but rather than the future will astonish and exhilarate. (Rorty, 1999:27-8)
I
don’t have much to say about this which is clear, so let me tell a story. At the
We
need to think about this in terms of research: if you don’t open yourself to
the other, to the full otherness of what the Divine means for you, you are
likely to be caught in egoic and conventional kinds
of choices. There needs to be this kind
of radical openness, a move away from the purely human interest, human
practice.
David
Loy, writing from a Buddhist perspective, argues that to be human is to
experience a sense of ungroundedness, of ‘lack’ and our sense of self is a
construct. From a Buddhist point of view, this sense of lack has its roots in
the impermanence of all things, including ourselves, and our attachment to
keeping things the same, which causes suffering. Much of human culture, and the projects to
which we are committed, can be seen at root as attempts to divert attention to
this underlying sense of lack, rather than address the lack directly through a
spiritual practice. From this perspective, all human projects have a religious
or spiritual dimension (Loy, 2003).
There
is a dimension of action research which I would call spiritual practice, which
is about opening to the world beyond the everyday. It is difficult to talk about since so many
of us are damaged by our religious experience (just as so many of us are
damaged by our educational experience) and because the fundamentalist movements
(in all major religions) are closing down the possibility of inquiry, so each
of us has to find their own articulation. Spiritual practice opens us to the
dimensions of action research which are fundamentally countercultural to
Western thinking:
The passion of the Western mind through the ages has been for control and domination, as Tarnas describes (1991), but Gregory Bateson identified an undercurrent of thought concerned with form, pattern and process rather than substance, which goes back at least to the Pythagoreans and comes to us through the Gnostics, alchemists and Romantics (Bateson, 1972:449; see also Skrbina, 2003). Today this is voiced through feminisms, the civil rights movement, deep ecology and Gaia theory , creation spirituality (Fox, 1983) and liberation theology, the voices of the underprivileged South (Fals Borda & Mora-Osejo, 2003), the movements protesting against neo-liberal capitalism and the war in Iraq, the World Social Forums. This is the stream of thinking that reminds us to listen to what is silenced, to honour the margins of our society (hooks, 1991), to always wonder, as ‘ironists’, how we come to see the world the way we do and use the language we do (Rorty, 1989). (Reason, in preparation 2003)
I
have tried to do this by drawing on Matthew Fox four paths of creation
spirituality, and have created a multimedia workshop experience within which to
do this (see www.bath.ac.uk/~mnspwr). We have at
Emergence
Since action research starts with everyday experience and is concerned with the development of living knowledge, in many ways the process of inquiry is as important as specific outcomes. Good action research emerges over time in an evolutionary and developmental process, as individuals develop skills of inquiry and as communities of inquiry develop within communities of practice. Action research is emancipatory, it leads not just to new practical knowledge, but to new abilities to create knowledge. In action research knowledge is a living, evolving process of coming to know rooted in everyday experience; it is a verb rather than a noun. (Reason & Bradbury, 2001)
There
is always a pressure in institutional contexts to do what my friend Suzie Morel
calls ‘end-game’, a term used in the inner-game teachings of Tim Gallwey (1986) to draw attention to the how, by attending
to outcomes, one fails to pay
attention to the present moment which creates the opportunities for successful
outcomes: in tennis, by being preoccupied by winning the point that one stops
actually watching the ball. So, for
example, ‘participation’ becomes something to achieve in a particular way,
rather than an organic process of human association.
We
must understand action research as a process that grows, develops, shifts
changes over time. Emergence means that the questions may change, the
relationships may change, the purposes may change, what is important may
change. This means action research cannot be programmatic and cannot be defined
in terms of hard and fast methods. There is something here of the spirit of
Lyotard’s description of the postmodern artist:
The postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by pre-established rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgement, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and principles are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.(Lyotard, 1979)
But I
think not only does an individual project emerge, but the whole practice of
action research is emergent. I find as I
talk about action research to different groups some of the questions are very
practical: How do you set up this kind
of group? How do you get funding? What is the relationship between action
research and action learning? Good
questions, but one that sometimes makes me want to scream! They seem to be
putting action research clearly into the box of being a just another research
methodology.
Once
I heard myself say in response, ‘action research is an aspiration, not a
possibility!’ and having said it I wondered what I meant. I think I meant that
there are two faces to action research: the practical question of how do we
engage with this group of people in the service of doing things better; and the utopian project of helping bring
forth a very different kind of world.
In
his discussion of politically engaged spirituality in a global civil society,
Richard Falk argues similarly that ‘Any societal order is partly behavioural,
partly mythic’, never completely and tangibly embodied in time and space, but
also held in attitudes, beliefs and relationships. Thus ‘To posit the existence of global civil
society is…a political act, both a description of what is, as well as a desire
for what is not yet’ (Falk, 2003).
The
same can be said for action research: it is partly a family of practical
methodologies for engaging people in dealing with key issues in their
lives. So the practical questions—how do
we enter participative relationships? how do you get funding? how can we do this
project as well as we can; how do you initiate a co-operative inquiry, conduct
a search conference? and so on—are all important and interesting questions to
engage with.
But
action research is also a utopian project.
It is also saying, suppose we had a different kind of world? How could we create a different kind of
world? Action research is not something
you can ‘do’ because each project is continually evolving and changing; and
because one can only do action research in its fullest sense in a different,
changed society, which action research is continually aspiring to create. By opening new communicative spaces we create
new kinds of context in a micro sense.
But in a wider sense there is a whole shift of perspective in order to
fully be in a participative world where we are acting and inquiring all the
time, and our organizations and truly learning and inquiring
organizations. For me this is about
creating a world in which we understand and experience ourselves as
participants with each other and with the whole. The notion that not only is each project is a
development process, but the whole project of action research also has this
kind of utopian quality, a kind of utopian adventure.
Some Conclusions
I
have tried to articulate these five dimensions of action research and to indicate
some of their complexity. There are, of
course, other formulations of action research which emphasize different
aspects. I think considering these dimensions of action research helps us
understand the idea of quality, because they demonstrate above all that action
research is full of choices. You could never be part of an inquiry which
fulfilled all those dimensions fully and completely; rather, you will always
have choices about what is important to attend to at any particular moment. I
suggest that quality in inquiry comes
from awareness of and transparency about the choices open to you and the
choices you are making at each stage of the inquiry; and as Lyotard might
suggest, creatively making and articulating your own quality rules as you go
along. Quality comes from asking, with
others, what is important in this situation? how well are we doing? how can we
show others how well we have done? I
would also suggest that it is not necessarily a question of whether you have
done well, but of how well you have done, and whether you have done well enough
for the claims you may wish to make.
Sometimes,
immediate practice is what is most important.
Someone wrote to me recently and said, ‘Peter, you are too hooked on
liberation, transformation, and the emancipatory aspects of action
research. Action research is sometimes
about issues like how we can put dressings on wounds better.’ Absolutely, sometimes it is.
But
sometimes in action research what is most important is how we can help
articulate voices that have been silenced. How do we draw people together in
conversation when they were not before?
How can we create space for people to articulate their world in the face
of power structures which silence them?
Sometimes,
action research will be about finding ways to open ourselves to different sorts
of realities, or finding different ways of telling stories. The Western mind,
it is often said, is hugely individualistic, and that individualism drives the
frenzied consumerism that is Western capitalism, with terrible consequences for
the majority human world and the more than human world. Maybe action research could explore how the
Western mind can open itself to a more relational, participatory experience
Sometimes
action research will be more about, what is worthwhile here, what should we be
attending to?
And
sometimes action research will be about creating tentative beginnings of
inquiry under very difficult circumstances, planting seeds that may emerge into
large fruits.
I
think it is a question of seeing these choices, seeing through the choices, and
being clear in a first-person sense, collaboratively in a second-person sense,
raising the wider debate in a third-person sense: what are the choices we are
making, and are they the right choices? Can we be transparent about these
choices in our reporting of our work?
That is what I think quality in action research is about.
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Figure 1. Characteristics of
Action Research
