Engaged scholarship: Steering between the risks of paternalism,opportunism,and paralysis

Introduction

Critical management studies (CMS) and engaged scholarship in general seem to provide an ideal home for Action Research (AR) understood as a collaborative research method generating both scientific knowledge and democratic social change (Greenwood, 2007). Especially in its critical versions, like critical AR (Johansson and Lindhult, 2008), critical-emancipatory AR (Duberley and Johnson, 2009), participatory action research (PAR; Grant et al., 2013), or critical participatory action research (CPAR; Kemmis, 2013), the methods have emancipatory ambitions closely aligned with a critical approach to studying management (Huzzard and Johansson, 2014). It perceives the researcher as a change agent, and therefore, it directly enacts a critical theory ideal of a social science whose goal is to challenge and replace prevailing relations of domination (Alvesson et al., 2009).

Paraphrasing Kurt Lewin, a founding father of AR, one can say that critical action researchers learn to understand relations of domination while trying to change them. By taking an active stance, they are attempting to create a positive impulse within the critical tradition, an impulse considered necessary for avoiding a marginalization of the critical perspective (Alvesson et al., 2009). At the same time, by engaging into a dialogue with powerful, participatory action, researchers risk compromising their critical ambitions.

I argue that critically oriented versions of AR, which struggle to implement in practice the critical ambitions to change the world, focus on tensions and dilemmas encountered by the majority of the critical scholars. The goal of this article is to build a holistic framework helping to explore and manage these tensions, as well as the uncertainty and ambiguity of the research process that arise from pursuing emancipatory goals.

I hope that the following analysis will be of help for critical researchers, who like myself were and are perplexed in their search for an answer to one of the core questions for critical scholars community: How and where should they locate themselves in relation to organizational change or even broader to the change of organizational constituencies (Alvesson et al., 2009). The analysis extensively uses examples from research practice illustrating how the tensions manifest themselves in the real-life context and how researchers are trying to reconcile them and often concluding that they are forced to compromise either critical ideals or the prospects for change. The proposed framework is an attempt to free oneself from this straightjacket. It climbs to the meta-level, to observe the researchers struggle from the perspective of power and of three meta-theoretical perspectives (pragmatism, constructivism, critical theory).

I depart from an argument that social research as any other kind of social relationship is constituted by multiplicity of force relations, that is, power. Power works through discourses, institutions, and practices that are productive of power effects, framing the boundaries of possibility that govern action (Foucault, 1979; Gaventa and Cornwall, 2013). The power effects infiltrating social research complicate the process of achieving emancipatory goals. I distinguish between three major types of research-related relationships involving power. These relationships are (1) between the participatory inquiry and its cultural, institutional, and social environment; (2) within ‘the community’ being studied, which itself is not homogeneous in terms of interests, values, and ability of their realization; and (3) between the researcher and ‘the community’. The major dilemmas corresponding to them are as follows: (1) how to conduct dialogical research based on the idea of equality, within the non-dialogical and hierarchical cultural and institutional environment, (2) how to invite and involve those in power into activities which expose domination and seek ways to reduce it, and (3) how to be a genuine partner to a ‘community’ and simultaneously to adopt a critical stance that presupposes the definition of their problem.

I use examples from research practice to illustrate that while facing these dilemmas and accompanying ethical risks, critically oriented AR scholars navigate between the three major meta-theoretical traditions of constructivism, critical theory, and pragmatism. When three traditions are used at the same time, the research practice is inconsistent. I claim, however, that this inconsistency should be seen as a strength rather than a weakness. These tensions are creative because they enable the researcher to expose intrinsic problems embedded in each approach in question, as well as in the use of any combination of two and to counterbalance them by a skillful management of the inquiry process. An exclusive following of any of them would expose the researcher to the ethical risks of opportunism (pragmatism), paternalism (critical theory), or relativism, and therefore paralysis (constructivism). Keeping a minimum level of variety enables the researcher to escape those pitfalls, manage the power effects related to the research process, and hence conduct an ethical emancipatory inquiry.

I start with a personal story illustrating the dilemmas I encountered when trying to implement critical theory ideals into research practice. I explore them further first through the meta-theoretical considerations and second by illustrating how researchers navigate between the three meta-theoretical positions when tackling problems of power within the three dimensions of research-related power relationships.

Setting the stage: researcher’s agenda and the power games

In my PhD research I was adopting a critical theory approach, asking questions about the possible conditions for the achievement of less unequal social relations. Using multiple case studies of environmental conflicts between corporations and local communities, I was going to illustrate relations between institutions and power. I was boldly offering all my interviewees access to my research results in order to raise their critical awareness and diminish power inequalities through exposing the interrelations between power, knowledge, and rationality. During the research process, my willingness to share the results gradually diminished. I was afraid that my detailed case studies of conflicts describing action, strategies, and the involved parties’ ways of thinking could be abused and somehow contribute to the worsening of the situation of groups which were already disempowered.

The field research was supposed to be published, thus advancing my scientific career. This made me more stressed as I seriously feared that somebody would be hurt because of my ‘intervention’. But then I was comforting myself: ‘nobody will bother to read it anyway’. Then it became clear to me: to solve my ethical problem, I was hoping that my research would not make any difference.

I started to reflect on the assumptions which had allowed me to believe that my research could make a difference. Some critical researchers (e.g. those creating critical ethnographies or critical case studies) would argue that the research results can have some influence on the wider public if it is communicated to them. They treat research results as ammunition helping ‘people involved in ongoing political struggle to question the relationships of knowledge and power and thereby work to produce change’ (Flyvbjerg et al., 2012: 2). Even if communication of detailed descriptive research on relations of power would not pose an ethical risk, as in the case of my own research, it is still prone to underestimate power inequalities. I have observed that pressures of stakeholders on participatory decision-making in ‘best case’ scenarios resulted in a ceremonial adaptation of dialogue principles. They were mainly used not for empowerment but for obtaining legitimacy for decisions that had already been taken.

My research did not change anything, and those few among the involved, to whom I passed the case reports, expressed their exasperation and frustration. I left disempowered groups where they were, but I added a critical mirror in which they could helplessly stare. This is how I came across the first research-related power relationship I distinguish in this article. I concluded that in the situation of high power asymmetries penetrating the institutional, cultural, and social environment of the research, it is not sufficient to just expose domination to make a difference. Here, the ‘conventional’ (not involving intervention) critical research not only does not reach the emancipatory goals. It even becomes an ethically risky exercise because it ‘teases, then frustrates its adherents, offering enlightenment to an existence of pessimism and despair, trapped within the confines of an immoral society that they are powerless to change’ (Zanetti, 1997: 156). In order to minimize this risk and the risk of an abuse of my research results, I compromised critical ideals and withdrew my empirical results into the realm of academia.

When looking for a research framework enabling me to introduce change, and simultaneously address the problems of both institutionalized power inequalities and ethics, I started to explore the literature on PAR. PAR recognizes that even ‘communicating new voices and categories is not enough’ (Gaventa and Cornwall, 2013: 181) and supplements its critical approach with a pragmatist component of problem-solving action. It seemed to address my concerns about the faint influence of ‘conventional’ research results on reality. Additionally, PAR seemed to answer my worries about the abuse of research results because it questions the divide between the research subject and object and allows for the sharing of responsibility for action and its consequences for those immediately affected by the problem.

I figured out that in order to arrive at change one can either support one marginalized group with common interests or adopt an attitude of ‘tempered radicalism’ implying working for a change ‘from within opposing structures’ (Meyerson and Scully, 1995). I choose the latter because I saw the non-participatory, hierarchical characteristics of local institutional arrangements as a main obstacle to arrive at democratic social relations. I situated my research on an aggregated level of policy making, in order to trigger a democratic process of negotiation between different value-based and thus inevitably conflictual perspectives present in the local community (Rayner, 2003). This in turn should result in broadening the scope of choices for those participating in the decision-making process. But then I realized that adopting the role of an ‘opener of a dialogue space’ was to ignore the power asymmetries that motivated my engaging with the research in the first place! As I had already observed in my previous research, just delivering an opportunity to be heard is not enough to guarantee that the voices of the relatively disempowered will be seriously taken into consideration.

This is how I came across the second research-related power relationship: between the participants of the ‘community’ being studied, which itself is not homogeneous in terms of interests, values, and ability of their realization. Not recognizing these differences meant petrifying the status quo.

I started to look for possibilities to strengthen the critical edge of my project. I planned to design research that would allow academic researchers, along with planners and administrators, to serve as transformative agents of change ‘as they work with citizens to educate and help uncover the relationships of oppression, exclusion, and inequity that prevail in so many political situations’ (Zanetti, 1997: 163). But problems kept on multiplying: How to invite and involve those in power into activities which expose and potentially reduce domination?

To make matters even more complicated, I started to reflect on my own power position. I felt that the strengthening of a critical edge will eventually force me not only to choose sides between ‘oppressors and oppressed’ but also to choose between the oppressed groups and between problems which eventually become a subject of the collective, problem solving inquiry. This reflection later developed into distinguishing the third research-related relationship based on power: between the researcher and the community under research.

I decided it was time to explore my dilemmas in practice and look for a community willing to be a partner in the project. I started with the community, which I had previously got to know in my research on conflicts. One of my former interviewees was a local activist who had become a councilor. I emailed him asking how he would estimate the usefulness of the undertaking. He offered to raise the issue at the council meeting. Anticipating the risk of associating the project with a specific political party I politely declined. Since the result of the project was supposed to be an implementation of a policy, the mayor, as representative of the executive power, seemed to be the right person to start with. The mayor, however, was not willing to meet me. After many phone calls and emails, he directed my proposal to the Department of Education [sic!], where it was supposed to be analyzed. After some time, I was informed by the assistant in the Department that the mayor rejected the proposition. Disappointed with this decision, I wrote to ‘my’ councilor informing him that the project would not be conducted.

The next morning, I received an email marked red and titled ‘The Mayor rejects the proposition of workshops financed by the National Science Center without consulting the councilors’. It was addressed to all councilors, local politicians, local administration officials, and the mayor himself. The content included an attack on the mayor’s general policy and my whole (semi-private?) correspondence with the councilor. My research was used in a power game before it had even begun. An email from the head of Department of Education followed directly. ‘You have misunderstood us’, it said, ‘due to time shortages the mayor rejected the proposition to meet with you, although not the project as a whole’. Along with one of the co-researchers, who was also a mediator, I met the head of the department and a vice-mayor. After a long ice-breaking conversation, they developed a strong interest in the project. However, the final decision was the mayor’s and he subsequently rejected the proposition. The vice-mayor, disappointed with the mayor’s refusal, stated, ‘he likes to hand control of everything, although it does not really work well. I think he could just not imagine a use for this kind of project’.

Summarizing, I was first imagining that my critical research will expose mechanisms of domination and therefore raise the critical awareness and empower stakeholders. Then, I faced ethical problems of communicating the research results and realized their faint significance outside of the domain of academia. The main source of the problem was the first research-related relationship involving power, that is, between research and its non-dialogical, hierarchical institutional context. This context limited the possibilities to pursue emancipatory effects with the use of ‘conventional’ critical research results. It remained a problem when an ‘unconventional’ component of action was introduced. That is, for those in power my proposition of a cooperative inquiry into the local governance processes was not so much endangering but was rather considered to be strange.

When trying to design a dialogue-like structure of the inquiry process, I was confronted with the risk of ignoring and even petrifying power inequalities within the community. But an attempt to strengthen the critical edge of the project would result in the problem of convincing those in power to participate in a power-deconstructing research. The final part of my ‘experiment’ warned me that non-academic participants might not recognize usefulness of participatory research as a learning opportunity but (ab)use it as a tool in the political struggle. These issues are later on analyzed as the second research-related relationship involving power, that is, power asymmetries within the community being researched.

The specific context of my project (local democracy) forced me to reflect on my own power position in the collective inquiry. I was going to influence the democratic process by supporting the disempowered. To what extent my facilitation will be in fact the excretion of power and not just ‘bringing out’ the local knowledge and values? I further reflect on these issues as an example of the third research-related relationship involving power, that is, between the researcher and the community.

I was consistently going back and forth from more a critical to a more pragmatist approach. I wanted to have both: critical reflection and transformative action, whereas it seems that you cannot make a transformative omelet without breaking the critical eggs. Table 1 summarizes the above considerations by connecting the research-based relationship influenced by power with a relevant power effect and dilemma.

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Table 1.

Basic dimensions of the framework and a related dilemma.

Research-based relationship influenced by power	Power effect	Question/dilemma
Between the participatory inquiry and its cultural, institutional, and social environment	Inertia—relations of domination are embedded in institutional arrangements, privileging purposive and non-purposive actions, which petrify them	How to conduct dialogical research based on the idea of equality, within the non-dialogical and hierarchical cultural and institutional environment?
Within ‘the community’ being studied, which itself is not homogeneous in terms of interests, values, and ability of their realization	Fractality—power as inherent feature of social relations; power relations are fractal; they repeat a pattern within itself, as geometric fractals do	How to invite and involve those in power into activities which expose domination and are seeking to reduce it?
Between the researcher and ‘the community’	Injection—power may be ‘injected’ into the system by the researcher, who herself executes power	How to be a genuine partner to a ‘community’ and simultaneously to adopt a critical stance that presupposes the definition of their problem?

A meta-theoretical framework

Out of a real explosion of intellectual, philosophical, and theoretical traditions important for the AR community (Reason and Bradbury, 2013), three traditions seem to be especially important and fruitful for the exploration of tensions within the critically oriented AR. These are the traditions of critical theory, pragmatism, and constructivism. ¹

Critically oriented versions of AR prioritize emancipation as an ultimate goal of research (Johansson and Lindhult, 2008: 102). Participatory inquiry challenges the conventional processes of knowledge production, it creates a space in which dominant discourses are questioned and reframed, and it thereby shifts the horizons of the possible. The focus on the relationship between knowledge and power is traceable to the Marxist theory of ideology and to the writers exploring how social location shapes individuals’ perceptions of the social world (Abbott, 2001). This is the critical theory tradition, which combines epistemological subjectivism, that is, assumptions about the social construction of knowledge, with ontological realism, that is, assumption about the existence of a reality independent of human subjectivity (e.g. structures of domination; Duberley and Johnson, 2009).

The constructivist tradition is the second crucial reference point for emancipatory AR (Grant et al., 2013; Hielsen, 2006; Reason and Bradbury, 2013: 18). It posits that realities are local, specific, and socially constructed (Lincoln et al., 2011). Exploring and bringing out authentic local knowledge is an important part of the empowerment enterprise because of the assumption that self-knowledge can be liberating. But—in contrast to critical theory—the constructivist tradition assumes ontological and epistemological subjectivism.

The emphasis on exploring local knowledge and experience makes a connection to the pragmatist tradition. In fact, critically oriented AR approaches the problems of power armed with a methodology originating from Pragmatism. It assumes the necessity of a group process involving diverse stakeholders with different experiences and knowledge of the problems at hand (Levin and Greenwood, 2011: 29). Contrary to the mainstream account of science, Pragmatism assumes that the production of knowledge and its application are intertwined, hence the crucial epistemological role of action (which is often missed by the ‘pragmatist’ school of thought within CMS; Johansson and Lindhult, 2008). Pragmatically oriented AR aims above all at improving the workability of human praxis; hence, participation is here ‘not just a moral value’ but is essential for a successful inquiry into complexity of the problems addressed (Greenwood, 2007: 131). The assumption of the pragmatist approach is that complexity requires the knowledge and expertise of a broad and diverse array of stakeholders and that it is common action on the problem, which enables us to gain valid knowledge and seek an effective solution.

The attempts to use these three perspectives simultaneously create irresolvable tensions. Using a definition of PAR, a representative of critically oriented AR, I illustrate how the pragmatist, critical, and constructivist perspectives are mutually undermining each other within one methodological framework:

PAR is a research methodology that attempts to address power imbalances and oppressive social structures. It values the ‘researched’ community as a vital part of the research project and its members as experts of their own experiences. PAR is especially concerned with oppressed communities and [it] attempts to create action as a catalyst for social change […] PAR identifies as goals: emancipation, participatory democracy, and the illumination of social problems and is a cyclical process of research, learning, and action. (Grant et al., 2013: 589)

So, PAR treats the ‘researched’ community as experts on their own experiences (constructivist perspective) and simultaneously presupposes that relations of domination are an important part of that experience (critical perspective). Thus, the critical theory perspective endangers the goals set by the constructivist perspective and vice versa (see Figure 1). PAR’s orientation toward action (Pragmatism) requires agreement on working within power structures and making use of the same power structures that it tries to challenge. This creates a serious risk of reinforcing the status quo or at least requires some form of compromise with it (endangering goals set by the critical theory perspective). PAR’s orientation toward exploring local knowledge through communication (constructivism) and toward problem solving (pragmatism) makes it prone to overlook the political nature of the cultural, institutional, and social environment within which inquiry takes place and by which all inquiry is infiltrated (strongly highlighted by critical theory approach). The constructivist and pragmatist orientations also make the researcher prone to assume that ‘the community’ is a monolith, just because as a whole it is producing common meanings and have some common problems to be solved. These tendencies go against the critical perspective, whose basic assumption is that relations of domination are universal and cannot be organized out of society.

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Figure 1.

Meta-theoretical approaches present in PAR.

On the other hand, separating the three in the name of purism and consistency raises other problems: those of self-reference and power. Logically speaking, a consistent use of critical theory results in imposing the domination framework upon those under research and hence leads researchers to the execution of power (Eikeland, 2006). Consistently used constructivism leads a researcher to the crisis of representation questioning the researchers’ ability to ‘truthfully’ describe the perspective adopted by those being studied (Abbott, 2001; Woolgar and Pawluch, 1985). A consistent pragmatist resolves the crisis of representation, thanks to the approach of co-creating knowledge (Johnsen, 2010). But by emphasizing the cooperation and problem-solving action, she risks opportunism, at least until she asks how power asymmetries influence the definition and solution of the problem (Duberley and Johnson, 2009; Jessop, 2011). Hence, a consistent researcher is exposed to the ethical risks of either paternalism (critical theory), relativism, and therefore paralysis (constructivism), or opportunism (Pragmatism).

In the following discussion, I will show how tensions between every pair of perspectives, or within every single perspective, can be resolved (or at least softened) by the use of the third one. I propose to analyze these tensions through the lens of power effects connected to social research and present: (1) between the participatory inquiry and its cultural, institutional, and social environment; (2) within ‘the community’ being studied, which itself is not homogeneous in terms of interests, values, and ability of their realization; and (3) between the researcher and ‘the community’. This kind of anchorage allows to transform the paradigms’ discussion into a creative interplay and useful tool signaling an approaching ethical risk as well as indicating possible ways out.

Conclusion

Critical scholars have discussed paradigmatic tensions and power issues for decades. I argue that a simultaneous exploration of the ways in which power infiltrates the critical (action) research, and of meta-theoretical tensions, creates a heuristic structure which gathers these problems together and enables the systematic exploration and management of uncertainty and ambiguity of a research process.

To deal with the problem of power infiltrating critical AR in the three aspects—the relationship between research and the institutional and cultural context, the relationships within the community of inquiry, and between the researcher and the community—one should cultivate a flexible repertoire of responses balancing pragmatist, critical, and constructivist traditions. In this way, strategies can be combined and rebalanced to reduce the likelihood of failure, which could have consequences either for ethics or for the inability to introduce change, and most probably for both. As illustrated in the analysis, when confronted with the problem of power each of the perspectives is prone to produce specific failures and at the same time delivers important insights into emancipatory enterprises. The pragmatist perspective is exposed to the danger of naiveté or the risk of cynicism while assuming problem-solving action without taking into account power asymmetries. The critical perspective is exposed to the danger of cynicism and the risk of impotence while assuming the universal character of domination and hence refusing cooperation with those in power. Moreover, it is also exposed to the risk of paternalism while presupposing the definition of the problem and refusing to accept the conservative sensitivity. The constructivist perspective is exposed to the danger of relativism which connects to the risk of paralysis. The weakness of each perspective is exposed and can be managed with the use of the other. Figure 2 summarizes the exemplary flows between perspectives which together create the safety network for the scholar trying to navigate between these risks.

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Figure 2.

Navigating between perspectives.

Hence, the process of research can be described as a constant attempt to avoid failures resulting from the increasing dominance of any of the three perspectives. The failures will not disappear because they are embedded in tensions which are irresolvable by their own nature. We can cope with them using pragmatist thought as a leading point of reference, that is, by adopting a pragmatist attitude of irony. Jessop (2011) describes this type of attitude in the relation to governance practices, but they can easily be adapted to any participatory critical inquiry:

The ironist accepts incompleteness and failure as essential feature of social life but acts as if completeness and success were possible. She must simplify a complex, contradictory and changing reality in order to be able to act—knowing full well that any such simplification is also a distortion of reality and, what is worse, that such distortions can sometimes generate failures, even if they are also a precondition of relatively successful interventions to manage complex interdependence. (p. 119)

The radicalism of critically oriented AR originating from the critical perspective should be tempered by conclusions drawn from the pragmatist perspective (action orientation—working within the system) and from the constructivist perspective (appreciating and respecting diverse realities and commitments). However attractive it may be for the researcher, the temptation of simplistic radicalism should be resisted. Putting it simply, critically oriented versions of AR should be critical in its aspirations, pragmatic in its practice, and constructivist in its understanding of its self, context, and tasks.