Action Research?

From January to June of last year (2009) as I was putting together my research outline for my PhD fieldwork I came across the concept of action-research. I have to admit that at that point I was relatively new even to the concept of "research", in that I had never really internalized how research exists as an intentional knowledge-generation process. In my master's degree program several years ago I had the standard quantitative research methods class and I had to write multiple papers—usually from a list of books, or a topic that a professor had provided for me in a syllabus—but I never conceived of what I was doing as a form of research. And outside of academia I was as exposed as anyone else to NPR and other news stories that began with "researchers found that…", or "in a survey of 10,000 master's degree students…", but for some reason I didn't "get" what research was all about. Entering into my PhD program I was clear that I wanted to read, study, reflect, write, and yes, generate new knowledge, but how research figured in to all of this was very hazy to me. In future blog posts on this subject I will revisit some of the problematic reasons that I got this far without a better understanding of research (always under the assumption that I was at least an "average" master's degree student—perhaps not the sharpest tool, nor the dullest, but certainly a perfectly good shovel!). But suffice it to say that if my understanding of research was hazy, action research was a completely new concept to me.

Although I lacked a deep understanding of the research side of the AR concept, I had significant experience on the action side of things through my work as an organizational "capacity building" practitioner over the previous ten years or so. In that role I had worked with multiple organizations who were seeking support on intentional change processes, usually meant to improve some organizational process, system, behavior or "capacity". Usually after some process for diagnosing organizational needs we would take action with members of the organization to dig deeper into the problem areas, the underlying factors, and exploring potential ways forward. This work was almost always done in intense 2-3 day participatory workshops in which we combined brainstorming, small group reflection and synthesis exercises, and occasionally the use of participatory techniques such as sociodramas, drawing, and other more creative means of expression and analysis. So I had quite a lot of experience on the action side of things, and since action research almost always starts with a question of the kind, "how can we improve this situation?" (Reason and Bradbury, 2008: 11), it seemed I was halfway to understanding what AR was all about.

But what did we learn from these processes? Beyond diagnosing needs, identifying underlying "causes" and developing action plans to move forward, did we learn anything about how improvement comes about in these organizations, about how they learn and change, or remain the same after the workshops are through? After the cathartic moment of getting multiple key folks together in one place and putting important, often ignored issues on the table, —after so much overwhelming work "in the field"—, what happens next? Did we examine how organizational culture and power relationships often allow us to change just enough in symbolic spaces such as workshops, so that when the workshops are finished things can "get back to" remaining the same? Did we introduce any critical thinking or even theory that might be relevant, and might help us reflect on how we reproduce unhealthy worldviews and behaviors with the people we work with inside and outside of our organization? Did we document key reflections that might be helpful later on, beyond the fully cooked workshop matrices, syntheses, action plans and other outputs that we have to report on?

My answer to these questions is "sometimes, not often enough", and definitely not with an intentional learning focus in mind—neither for the organizations nor the facilitators. So I have helped many organizations address organizational sustainability, financial management, strategic planning and other needs not by helping them learn through the incredible complexity in which they are immersed, but by shot-in-the-arm intense action processes largely devoid of learning and research. I am not suggesting many of these processes were not helpful in some way; I think they often generated important reflection and responded to expectations in many ways. But I do feel that they reinforced a non-critical action culture that most of the organizations and facilitators I know work within, in which the deeper, structural problematic issues around transformational change and one's role in that change are not discussed, and deep organizational assumptions are left unmoved.

This is problematic to me and it relates to a dichotomy that exists in much development practice, which Reeler (2007) frames in terms of "the ungrounded academic versus the unthinking practitioner". The idea is that much academic thinking on development is very critical and important but not grounded in ideas on how to go about doing things differently. On the other hand, much development intervention—often run through projects—lacks spaces and practices of reflection, theorizing and critical thinking. As Smit (2007) frames it, we're too much in the "to do" mode. Action research, with its focus on combining theory and practice, action and reflection, and respecting emergent change, challenges both poles in this dichotomy and invites us to develop new methodologies for intervening in complex change situations that incorporate A/R principles. The idea that this type of research / practice existed heavily resonated with me as I thought about how to go about my own doctoral research. So I dug deeper and made AR the core part of my research methodology and I have also started trying to more intentionally incorporate AR into the classes I teach.

In future blog posts I will go deeper into what is AR to me (and others), how that is playing out in my work and life, and why I think students, organizational change facilitators, development practitioners, and social change organizations in general, should incorporate more AR into their work. As Dreze (2002: 818) notes, "the case for action-based research appears to me to be particularly strong if the aim of the research is to facilitate human advancement and social change". But for now I'll end with a quote by Peter Reason, an author that was particularly helpful to me in understanding "why research?", which I believe is important before assuming that learned research techniques (the "how" of research) might be meaningful to students and practitioners.

The quest for living knowledge is directly connected with working with people in their life situations, working with how people experience their worlds and how we might work together to change them. (Reason, 1996: 19)

References

DREZE, J. 2002. On Research and Action. Economic and Political Weekly, March 2, 2002, 3.

REASON, P. 1996. Reflections on the Purposes of Human Inquiry. Qualitative Inquiry, 2, 13.

REASON, P. & BRADBURY, H. (eds.) 2008. The Sage Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice, London: Sage.

REELER, D. 2007. A Theory of Social Change and Implications for Practice, Planning, Monitoring and Evaluation. CDRA.

SMIT, M. 2007. We're Too Much in 'To Do' Mode: Action Research into Supporting International NGOs to Learn (Praxis Paper 16). In: INTRAC (ed.) Praxis Papers. Oxford: INTRAC.