Getting your hands dirty: critical action research in a state agency

Introduction

The relationship between research and practice has been extensively debated in this journal. Beirne (2008: 684) argues for the practical ‘working out’ of critically-oriented research rather than an abstentionist stance. Stewart and Martinez Lucio (2011: 339) call for a ‘new methodology of engagement’, which requires a ‘direct and more interactive form of working with those we are studying’. Action research (AR) framed by critical realism (CR) is one means (Brook and Darlington, 2013; Huzzard and Bjorkman, 2012). A a CR-based action study is presented that applies these ideas. The objective is to explain how the study was devised and implemented and to show that it worked in the twin senses of having an effect on the organization studied and demonstrating that the use of CR made a difference to the result. The study was devised from the outset in CR terms, and it offers a real-time story of the process. Its contribution is thus to put into practice some rather broad and programmatic statements about CR and AR.

There are two subsidiary contributions. First, the article is an account of a state business support agency, ‘SUPPAG’, and its work with businesses, specifically ‘new migrant businesses’ (NMBs: firms established by ‘new’ migrants from areas including eastern Europe and Africa, as opposed to people joining existing migrant communities). A state agency is a more challenging context for a scholar interested in emancipation than is research ‘on the side of the marginalized and labour’ (Brook and Darlington, 2013: 233); hence a relatively strong test of the value of engagement is provided. Second, the NMB is an important emerging organizational form at the bottom of the labour market (see Ahmad, 2008; Anderson, 2010; Bloch, 2013; Ram et al., 2008). Understanding the context in which it operates contributes to knowledge of this area of work.

The remainder of the article is organized as follows. First, four critical realist concepts and how they deepen AR are presented. The next task is to explain how these ideas were brought into contact with AR in the consideration of methods. This discussion embraces a reporting of specific methods, but is also part of the substance of the article in explaining the ability of the methods to produce certain outcomes; that is, the research design is part of the story. The outcomes of the project are then presented in two parts. The first is a summary of findings on NMBs. This shows how the evidence required SUPPAG to see these firms in new ways. The second part identifies the impact that the project had on changing SUPPAG’s practice. The discussion reflects on the impact of the research on the main parties affected. The conclusion considers implications for researchers.

Critical realism and new migrant businesses

CR is a meta-theory which is often stated in very broad terms. Several ways in which it can be applied empirically are discussed elsewhere (Edwards et al., 2014). The four aspects used here are those that link most clearly to the agenda of AR in terms of working directly with actors and considering how they can change some process or object. The first three ideas can be expressed through the Context-Mechanism-Outcomes realist framework as initiated by Pawson and Tilley (1997) and deployed widely subsequently (e.g. Pawson and Manzano-Santaella, 2012). It is most conveniently laid out by starting at the most applied end, and then introducing the fourth idea.

Working with critical realism

Action research is a term used to describe a variety of processes involving interventions in organizations that aim to bring about some form of practical change and develop wider knowledge (Cassell and Johnson, 2006). We chose it for three reasons. First, opportunity. The idea for the project originated from a member of the research team, who was a Non-Executive Board Director at SUPPAG. He was in a position to pull levers, and did so in order to initiate the project. Second, the objective of the project – to promote engagement with NMBs – was potentially compatible with the critical realist sympathies of the research team. Explicitly linking AR with CR is promising because ‘there is a concordance between critical realist premises and action research with its cyclical inquiry and advancement of social change’ (Houston, 2010: 73). Finally, the project offered a vehicle to develop the theoretical perspective of mixed embeddedness and utilize it to shape practice in a progressive fashion. The project ran from 2008 to 2010. The way in which the critical realist ideas outlined earlier were brought into collision with the practical endeavour of AR is now discussed.

SUPPAG simply required us to identify concentrations of NMBs and enumerate new migrant intermediary networks in the region. However, the researchers oriented the project to address a more fundamental research question addressing mechanisms and context: ‘Why do new migrant businesses not use the services of SUPPAG?’ The aim was to examine the underlying conditions that gave rise to few, if any, NMBs receiving support from SUPPAG. There were three inter-related components to this task. First, it was necessary to develop a causal account of the origins and nature of the new migrant enterprise that could cast light on the issue of ‘business support’. Second, NMBs’ views of support agencies were addressed: what were the mechanisms linking their business activity to the outcome of whether or not they engaged with SUPPAG? Third, SUPPAG too had to be examined to assess how its causal powers served to exclude or hinder interactions with new migrant businesses.

Five research methods were used. Two of these related directly to SUPPAG’s operation at the level of the empirical. First, detailed semi-structured interviews with 165 NMBs were conducted. The sample was evenly split between migrants from the eight eastern European countries that joined the EU in 2004, usually termed A8 (Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia), and Africa and the Middle East (AME). This survey aimed to map the terrain. Second, we used focus groups to dig deeper. With both methods, questions to participants were explicitly designed to address context and mechanisms. Contextual questions focused on the impact of markets and competition, location and regulation. Mechanisms were investigated by exploring how different forms of capital (social, financial, human (Bourdieu, 1986)) were mobilized in order to survive in owners’ trading environments.

The third method began from SUPPAG’s agenda, which required data on new migrant intermediary organizations with a view to identifying relevant networks to disseminate business support information. The researchers went beyond a mapping exercise in order to understand what these organizations did and hence what mechanisms they were affecting. As well as mapping around 50 groups, the researchers went ‘beyond contract’ by intensifying their involvement with such groups in a number of ways, including: undertaking detailed interviews with 21 intermediaries; developing collaborative links with some groups; and brokering relationships with SUPPAG.

Observation was the fourth method used, and was not required (or welcomed) by SUPPAG. Its purpose was to examine the way in which SUPPAG ‘constructed’ ethnic minority and new migrant enterprise. Two forms of observation were deployed. First, as a Non-Executive Director, one of the research team was present at meetings and gatherings at which the strategy to support small firms was discussed. He attended some 10 board meetings during the course of the project, and had numerous informal conversations with senior directors. This provided an insight into: the pressures that SUPPAG was subjected to by its principal funder to meet an array of targets; how the notion of ‘ethnic minority’ enterprise was constructed at a strategic level (which emphasized the ethnic rather than business characteristics of the firm); and its existing approaches to engaging such businesses (often sub-contracted to a narrow group of ethnic minority intermediaries, excluding new migrant communities). Second, two members of the research team were effectively participant observers; they operated as part of the business adviser team. They witnessed the implementation of actual practices and policies towards ethnic minority businesses. Key among these were the internal SUPPAG ‘champions’ who promoted awareness of ethnic minority businesses; their remit was to act as a source of information and to work with colleagues to promote greater engagement with such firms. However, it became evident that these ‘champions’ were often diverted from this role by other elements of their job; did not share their knowledge of ethnic minority firms systematically with other members of the organization; were insufficient in number to cover all parts of the region; and had little if any specialist knowledge of new migrant communities.

The final critical realist idea – that of changing lay conceptualizations – was pursued through the fifth method, a process of critical reflection, namely, a process of mutual learning involving researchers and other project stakeholders (Winter and Munn-Giddings, 2001: 54). The importance of CR to this process lies in its insistence that the exchanges between researchers and practitioners are guided by a commitment to illuminate, and possibly alter, the generative mechanisms that operate in the research setting. The episodes of critical reflection involved the research team and practitioners from SUPPAG. At these gatherings, which were held on a monthly basis and lasted between two and three hours, the researchers explored SUPPAG officers’ theories-in-use as they related to NMBs. These gatherings were not a vehicle for consensus-building as in some forms of AR. Rather, research subjects’ accounts were related to their referents and context, and not necessarily accepted at face value. They formed part of the overall explanatory account that was being developed. The meetings were also used as an opportunity to develop new approaches to engaging with NMBs. A number of joint initiatives, informed by our explanatory account of NMBs, were taken during the course of the project (see next section).

What constitutes ‘valid’ action research has always been a thorny issue. The present approach was informed by Sayer’s (2000) concept of ‘practical adequacy’. Research is practically adequate when it is ‘fit for purpose’, that is, when it takes into account three parties – the researchers, the audience and the subjects of research (Olsen, 2010). Practical adequacy, in this view, is assessed in terms of the ability of the research to address pressing problems as well as its capacity to generate conceptual knowledge. For present purposes, practical adequacy was assessed in relation to the capacity of the research to produce a rich causal account of new migrant enterprises, which could then be used to change practice in SUPPAG and enhance its services towards NMBs. It entails a potentially tricky balance of theoretical and practical objectives, and was addressed in two ways. First the theoretical grounding of the intervention directed attention to the mechanisms that generated NMBs as well as the practical implications. This was reflected in the funding of the project – a collaboration between a social science research council and SUPPAG – and its delivery (discussed above). Second, the organization of the project ensured that sufficient rapport was achieved to develop productive fieldwork relationships that yielded useful information and insights, while not running the risk of being so identified with participants that objective analysis was compromised (see Dundon and Ryan, 2010, on the dynamics of rapport). The different roles of researchers were extremely important. The first author’s position as Non-Executive Director enabled him to overcome the issue of access, develop a detailed ‘practical understanding’ (Van Maanen, 1991) of SUPPAG and act as a gatekeeper for other researchers on the project. The fourth and fifth authors – who were participant observers – had extensive links with NMBs and new migrant intermediaries. This knowledge was seen as a resource by SUPPAG officers, which meant that the researchers were able to develop cooperative fieldwork relations; rarely was any suspicion or reluctance encountered. The second and third authors had more ‘distant’ roles which comprised, with other team members, regular discussions on emerging patterns in the data, explorations of the developing themes and active involvement in the writing-up of the research.

Outcomes: explaining new migrant businesses

This section outlines a key outcome of the research: the production of a contextualized account of NMBs. Explanation is a necessary precursor to change; the role of theory is to critique lay understanding prior to the consideration of possible solutions (Rogers, 2004). Certainly mixed embeddedness, infused with a sensitivity to CR, was vital to making sense of the apparent diversity of NMBs. The sample of business owners illustrated Vertovec’s (2007) idea of ‘super-diversity’. They represented no fewer than 22 national origins, and diversity in respect of immigration status and migration motives too.

However, consistent with critical realist principles there is a marked dissonance between the ‘naïve’ realism of immediate perception and the deeper essence. More specifically in the case of migrant entrepreneurship, novel provenance does not produce novel outcomes. On the contrary, the present findings make a case for historical continuity, with NMBs reproducing many of the characteristics of their South Asian predecessors. In this respect the most salient finding about NMBs is that they tend to struggle in a narrow range of low value, highly competitive market sectors. Over three quarters of the sample are concentrated in activities such as low-end retail, catering and personal services; this pattern is common to A8 countries and AME migrants. Further, many had a turnover of less than £10,000 annually, sub-economic returns not permitting even a living wage, still less profitability. Partly this reflects the part-time nature of many firms, subsidized as they were by outside earnings. While in principle the market is wide open, in practice it largely restricts under-resourced newcomers to easy entry vacancies, where ‘many aspiring entrepreneurs opt for the same markets … resulting in cut-throat competition’ (Kloosterman, 2010: 34).

Presented in this way, it appears that entrepreneurial agency is powerfully constrained within a structural environment in which social actors’ choices are decidedly limited. A key factor limiting entrepreneurial choice is sectoral concentration, the tight confinement of firms into a narrow band of market sectors and their virtual exclusion from others. For the most part, these least desirable of market opportunities have become almost stereotypically linked with migrants; they are ‘the traditional and quintessential breeding grounds for immigrant entrepreneurs in advanced urban economies’ (Kloosterman, 2010: 29).

Understanding the meaning of the NMBs’ economic activity required deeper investigation. For example, it appeared that African business owners were diversifying into non-traditional activities like estate agency, care homes and money changing. More careful examination shows many of these to be either completely exceptional or deceptive in appearance. For instance, in response to the widespread migrant practice of money remittance to the homeland, money transfer is an expanding practice among migrant entrepreneurs but it is often run as a sideline of a completely traditional firm such as a butcher’s shop. Similarly, the internet cafes run by several Africans and Kurds prompted the researchers to initially classify them as part of the communications sector. In reality, further deliberation and investigation revealed them to be low-tech catering establishments distinguished only by their provision of a few computer terminals.

The NMB economy thus tends to revolve around unambiguously traditional marginal activities, which accounted for over half the sample, rising to 64 per cent in the case of A8 migrants. Given the latter’s status as EU citizens with legally unrestricted job choice, the narrowness of their business interests is all the more striking. Low-end retailing (mostly food shops and newsagents) and personal services like hairdressing and nail cosmetics accounted for over 30 per cent of the A8 sample. In the case of the AME migrants, these two sectors are also over-represented but less so than the predominant activity, restaurant catering, another migrant ‘quintessential’.

Consistent with their often traumatic conditions of entry into the UK, over half of the AME group arrived in Britain completely or virtually devoid of any cash savings. Even the A8 entrepreneurs were mostly obliged to build up their start-up capital laboriously through savings eked out from low wage employment. Relatively few had benefited significantly from informal funding through friends and family, a social capital deficit rendering them far more disadvantaged than predecessor groups like South Asians. It would seem that the small minority of entrepreneurs who have broken away from the ‘quintessential’ sectors – 18 firms classed as ‘educational and training’, a further 18 in ‘communication and media’ − were mostly among the exceptional few who managed to bring viable amounts of capital from the homeland.

Attractive though they may be as smooth entry routes into self-employment, these sectors prove far less satisfactory after entry has been accomplished. As Kloosterman (2010) points out, ease of entry is a double-edged sword, advantageous for the pioneer wave of entrants but then generating overcrowding. Reflecting this market saturation, a recurring problem voiced by our respondents was the need to fight off excessive numbers of competitors. In the case of the AME migrants, this problem expressed itself as frustration at having to rely on the loyalty of their own ethnic communities to provide custom. No fewer than 67 of the 81 AME firms told us that their own community was their paramount source of custom, with four intensely annoyed by an inability to tap into mainstream consumer markets. As one lamented, ‘I don’t know what I have to do to get British customers’, a theme taken up by another shopkeeper who had ‘tried all forms of advertising but other communities just don’t come in’. As earlier studies have shown, this over-dependence on co-ethnic custom is one of the most stifling of all the various brakes on the expansion of migrant firms (Ram and Jones, 2008).

Yet, structurally enclosed as they are, the respondents were far from passive. Rather they showed a genuinely assertive awareness of what ought to be done to achieve success and the proper role of the business support environment. Typical of the comments in this vein is the shopkeeper who declared, ‘I need support to better market my product’ and the cafe owner convinced that this was a ‘real need that should be addressed by business support agencies’. Even though few may have been able to raise the necessary resources to put their visions into practice, the imagined growth was anything but vague, with concrete proposals ranging from opening new branches to widening the product range.

The new migrant entrepreneurial base is in many ways even more fragile than that of the South Asians who preceded them. Lack of concrete resources is a problem common to most migrant entrepreneurs but in this case it was compounded by a lack of familiarity with alien surroundings and networks of advice and support. Almost three quarters of the sample voiced a specific concern with under-funding (which was also a recurring theme in the focus groups). However, there were also frequent references to the need for advice, training, mentoring and legal knowledge (such themes also recurred in the focus groups); this highlights the more general deleterious effects of cultural dislocation. Not only must NMBs grapple with the most demanding and risky of occupations but most of them must do this in a foreign language and in an alien business and social environment. In itself, the tangible lack of start-up and working capital is disabling, but this is compounded by ignorance of how to access it in an incomprehensible new environment. Perhaps this fog of incomprehension is best expressed by the Polish shopkeeper who would ‘like to speak to a mentor who has a deep understanding of this country.’

Outcomes: changes to SUPPAG

This section outlines how the idea of morphogenetic loops helped to change SUPPAG’s conceptualization of ‘ethnic’ minority businesses, moving away from essentialized notions and towards a view grounded in the mixed embeddedness perspective. The researchers’ immersion in the organizational setting over a sustained period of time allowed them to furnish participants with a set of causal concepts to reinterpret their perceptions. The implications of the explanatory account of NMBs were assessed in the light of participants’ circumstances. This produced changes in the outlook of participants, the development of new relationships with intermediaries that extended beyond a narrow group of ethnic brokers, and a new support initiative informed by the theory of mixed embeddedness. Each is discussed in turn.

The change in the outlook of SUPPAG officers was a gradual affair emerging from interactions between researchers and practitioners during the course of the project. Sharing insights on theoretical ideas and findings from the survey and focus groups (undertaken in late 2008 and 2009) was central to this process. Practitioners valued these ongoing exchanges; one SUPPAG officer remarked, ‘I think that … the good thing was that all the information that was being held in the project wasn’t being kept until the very end … I think that we did learn as we went along’. This change in outlook – precipitated by the process of critical reflection and ongoing interactions between researchers and SUPPAG officers – also led to a re-assessment of the role of ethnic minority businesses champions (which was a practice that was informed implicitly by essentialized notions of ethnicity). The myriad other commitments of these champions meant that they were not very effective in their designated role. A community leader who had worked with SUPPAG commented, ‘I have been in touch with SUPPAG several times, I have never heard about these ethnic minority champions.’ Towards the end of the project, the decision to abolish the champions’ role was taken. In effect, the causal powers of SUPPAG’s approach of supporting ethnic minority businesses – that is, viewing such businesses in terms of ethnicity rather than broader context in which they were embedded – were shown to be inadequate.

The insights from the research helped SUPPAG officers to ease the grip of the narrow group of ethnic brokers who were acting as gatekeepers to ethnic minority businesses. Hence, the research served as a resource for ‘knowledge-based arbitration’ rather than ‘arbitration on the basis of power’ (Porter and Shortall, 2009: 259). SUPPAG duly began to develop working relationships with a wide range of new migrant intermediary networks in the latter part of 2009 and early 2010, many of which were unknown to the organization prior to the commencement of the research. SUPPAG began to hold regular meetings with these intermediaries. The meetings often served as precursors to a number of joint events and activities. This extract from an email from one of the networks indicates their keenness to engage with SUPPAG:

As part of one of our projects, we will be displaying the products or services of at least 20 businesses … We would like SUPPAG to be present as we are trying to bring potential clients and funding bodies/business support together … I want to know that you will be available for interaction with the participants.

In another communication from an intermediary whom the researchers introduced to SUPPAG, the respondent commented, ‘Thank you very much. I have managed to get funding support of computers and there is a possibility that SUPPAG may be able to subcontract me some of their work. I am thrilled’. Other engagement initiatives included workshops with business owners, focus groups and collaborations with new migrant intermediary organizations. SUPPAG officers suggested that such efforts were instrumental in increasing the number of interactions with ethnic minority businesses from 2999 in the year before the project to 4214 after the end of the initiative. This increase was considerably more than expected.

Finally, the re-conceptualization of ethnic and new migrant businesses informed the development of a major new initiative to support NMBs. Crucially, this process of change and critical reflection occurred during the gestation phase of a major SUPPAG investment in ‘outreach’ support. As the present project was drawing to a close in late 2009, SUPPAG initiated a ‘community-based’ adviser programme; it comprised the recruitment of six business support officers who would be based in particular geographic communities across the region. Previous experience suggested that these officers would have been ‘ethnically-matched’ with particular groups; this again is redolent of ethnic essentialism. The experience of the present project was an important influence upon the new initiative (which the researchers helped to implement in 2010). It was decided that the familiarity with geographical communities would be more important than ethnicity. This is consistent with some of the key tenets of mixed embeddedness. For example, rather than focusing solely on ethnicity, the new initiative emphasized the importance of developing an understanding of the context in which many new migrant business owners were located. The responsible SUPPAG officer explained:

The learning from the new migrant project was continually being fed into the community-based adviser programme. It was invaluable in helping us think through what we would want from the business advisers and how we would want them to operate.

Discussion

This article has pursued an action research question, of how researchers can work with social actors to change something. This basis meant that some CR questions could not be addressed. If the researchers had engaged with bodies similar to SUPPAG, would similar results have emerged, and what might such comparison tell us about the context and mechanisms leading to what was observed here? Yet bringing in CR principles strengthened the project by leading us to ask about the nature of the NMBs with which SUPPAG wished to engage, the image that SUPPAG had of them, and how changing the latter could improve levels of engagement. That is, morphogenetic loops were investigated. Why was it that SUPPAG was open to change? Though decisive answers cannot be provided, the following points can be made. First, SUPPAG was under pressure in terms of its performance targets to demonstrate engagement with ethnic and minority businesses. Second, the involvement of one of the research team opened up the possibility of devising a new approach. Third, the team had an established track record of working with minority firms and intermediary bodies, and thus had a level of credibility. Fourth, the project occurred over a period of years, and there was the time for new thinking to emerge. Finally, at the time SUPPAG operated within an established context of funding which gave it the space to work on new ideas. As noted below, when this context changed the world looked very different.

The researchers drew on the core critical realist ideas of layered ontology, mechanisms and morphogenetic loops to help in the task of promoting greater engagement with NMBs. The first two ideas are consonant with mixed embeddedness, a theoretical approach that stresses structural and social relationships of minority firms. But theoretical fit alone is insufficient. One must engage with the logic of practice if critical capabilities are to result in organizational change. Changing lay conceptualizations by working actively with the idea of morphogenetic loops is crucial to this process. The research team engaged with a variety of actors inside and outside the organization to both understand the nature of the research object (new migrant enterprise) and communicate our perspective. This incremental perspectivism (Porter and Shortall, 2009) helped to hone our understanding and generate more plausible explanations of the experience of NMBs and business support. The various interactions during the fieldwork – focus groups, joint activities and episodes of critical reflection – were all means of co-creating shared knowledge of the causal conditions that gave rise to NMBs, and opportunities to explore theoretically-informed alternatives.

The overall validity of the exercise rests upon the extent to which it is ‘practically adequate’ (Sayer, 2000), that is, fit for purpose in relation to three parties: researchers, the research participants and the wider audience. The theoretical pay-off for the researchers was new data on NMBs that was used in substantive papers and appreciation of links between research and policy.

For participants in NMBs, the research was able to refine their links with SUPPAG by revealing to SUPPAG who they were and what they wanted. They benefited from the project in that they gained access to networks of business support of which they were previously unaware. Much of the increase in the numbers of NMBs using SUPPAG was attributed to the research. It is true that ‘transforming recalcitrant structures’ (Collier, 1998: 464) is acutely difficult. But small, incremental steps towards grasping ways of improving the enterprise can nonetheless be important in developing new connections which may prompt more enlightened ways of working. That said, the study was not designed as an analysis of NMBs themselves; to pin down longer-term effects would entail a longitudinal study of such proximal outcomes as rates of engagement with SUPPAG and distal ones such as survival rates and growth in sales.

For participants in SUPPAG, changes in mental models used to understand NMBs have been evidenced. The research linked the academic discourse of mixed embeddedness with a lay discourse that was predicated on an essentialist notion of ethnic and new migrant enterprise. Critical realist action research served as a communicative bridge between these discourses, and provided participants with the means to move on from their initial views. This resulted in theoretically-informed practical outcomes that included: enhancing the knowledge base of a key business support organization; establishing relationships with intermediaries; developing potentially important support networks; and facilitating the delivery of actual business support to new migrant communities. By co-producing knowledge of structures and mechanisms, causal responsibility was placed in participants’ own hands (Friedman and Rogers, 2009) and demonstrate that CR has relevance for policy makers and practitioners (Ackroyd, 2009). As with the NMBs, demonstrating lasting value is more difficult. The terrain occupied by SUPPAG was transformed by the decision of the Coalition Government elected in 2010 to abolish Regional Development Agencies and to restructure business support (Shutt et al., 2012). The learning built up in SUPPAG has probably not survived these events in any coherent way. Such external shocks are of course common. In one respect, they underline the analytical value of CR in its stress on context: the context changed as a result of the causal powers of the government of the day, powers that themselves reflect the fact that local agencies such as the English RDAs have always been heavily dependent on central government, in contrast to their greater influence and autonomy in countries such as Germany and Italy (Crouch et al., 2001).

The wider audience includes practitioners of CR and AR. For the former, the researchers have addressed the (rarely fulfilled) normative commitments within CR (Rogers, 2004; Sayer, 2000). The project helped to show how CR can be applied. For the latter, it has been shown that AR can be grounded in a layered ontology and that this grounding helps it to generate a critical engagement with practice: it can interrogate practice while stressing the context in which it takes place and the constraints facing practitioners.

Conclusions

What, then, can researchers interested in engaged research take from the study? It is of course a very particular case, and lessons are indirect rather than direct. The most general is that it is possible to engage with state agencies, as well as bodies such as trade unions and other organizations of labour, in ways that do not compromise the independence of research. Engaging with agencies like SUPPAG, migrant support intermediaries (MacKenzie et al., 2012), informal networks (Bloch, 2013) and indeed the businesses that migrants establish (Ram et al., 2008) can be helpful in creating the kind of supportive alliances with migrants that many advocate (Datta et al., 2007; Holgate, 2005). Such engagement always raises questions of whether one is helping an existing structure of power to work better, rather than challenging that power. But almost any engagement involves these questions. In the present case, the contention is that it was better for SUPPAG to have an informed picture of NMBs rather than an uninformed one, and that the result helped the firms and potentially those who worked for them.

A second lesson concerns the terms of engagement: in this case, the research did not damage – indeed, it supported - the interests of parties affected by it. But suppose that SUPPAG had wanted, say, to support only NMBs from the A8. That might well have been inconsistent with research integrity. The lesson here is to be aware of the ways in which research can affect parties involved with it, and to make explicit decisions as to whether it has become compromised. This includes being sensitive to indirect as well as direct effects. Thus, in principle aiding NMBs could disadvantage other firms. In this case, such effects are likely to be small or absent: aiding NMBs to engage with their environment does not reduce the opportunities for other firms, and might enhance them if a vibrant community of firms generates positive spillover effects. But of course there are opportunity costs in any policy choice, and one would want to be confident that resource allocation was commensurate with the ‘needs’ of firms in terms of how many NMBs there were and their needs, as new firms, compared to any other new firm.

A third lesson concerns the researchers themselves. Engagement with one party can damage independence and the ability to work with others. In this case, the risks were small since the effects of the research were mainly to do with the overall operation of a system and its (positive-sum) improvement for all, rather than the (zero-sum) interests in terms of the distribution of rewards. The more that zero-sum interests are affected, the more is engagement an issue. This is not to say that research should not be so engaged. It is for example perfectly coherent to argue that the low-paid deserve more pay at the expense of profit, but then the position of the researcher needs to be made explicit. There are also mixed situations. In the present case, other firms might have believed that better-functioning NMBs reduced their own ability to compete. To the extent that the belief is false, the research can claim independence. If it has some truth, the researcher might consider the relevant costs and benefits and still argue for her objectivity. In other cases, an explicit adoption of one party’s interests might be required.

Overall, though simple cost−benefit analysis of the effects of an action intervention should be avoided, the research illustrates how the aims of CR to emancipate social actors can be addressed. The research was able to change the mental models used by SUPPAG, and independent evidence of the effects of this change was produced. The benefits have to be set alongside any direct, indirect and opportunity costs, for actors and also for the researchers themselves. Such consideration is demanding, but no-one thinks that engaged research is easy.

The multi-stakeholder interaction required by critical engagement encourages active consideration of the socio-political dimensions of knowledge generation. In the present case, the researchers were multiply located in the sense that they occupied a variety of different discursive positions in relation to SUPPAG. They were neither insiders nor outsiders, analysts nor activists, consultants nor detached academics. Rather, they were ‘enablers’ (Olsen, 1994), working with participants to bring critical knowledge to bear on organizational practice. Researchers in other contexts will be differently situated; CR (and AR) encourages reflection on location and the levers available to shape the direction and purpose of research.

Finally, the organization of research needs to aim for scientific and practical relevance. Attention needs to be given to the blend of skills of the research team in order to ensure that the knowledge generated is both ‘actionable’ and theoretical. The present group of researchers reflected this arrangement, comprising novice researchers with great experience of migrant communities and seasoned academics focusing more on theoretical matters. Nonetheless, the approach to the research, analysis and interactions with practitioners was genuinely collaborative, thus fulfilling a key condition of such research: ‘Strong connections with practice settings need to be coupled with strategies aimed at achieving sound and non-manipulative knowledge of organizational transformation processes’ (Denis and Lehoux, 2010: 374).