Changing universities through action research: The dilemma of scope in pluralistic environments

Abstract

The paper departs from the work of Davydd Greenwood and Morten Levin on the transformation of universities through action research to raise the question of how action research can be the engine of change in an organisational setting where conditions are inimical to its practice. It shares some theoretical contributions that frame this challenge and proposes insider action research as a potential method to face it. The paper then presents the case of Orkestra-Basque Institute of Competitiveness and its impact in changing the University of Deusto. The case focuses mainly on how this institute has developed insider action research. The case, connected to the previously presented theoretical framework, is used for discussion purposes and to pose what the author terms the dilemma of scope of action research in pluralistic university environments.

Keywords

Insider action research university role duality

Introduction

Action research (AR) has been considered a promising approach to address societal challenges such as unstable economic systems, climate change and lasting poverty (Wittmayer and Schäpke, 2014). Many of the action researchers who want to contribute to solving these challenges work within a university, and its organisational setting either supports or hinders their endeavours.

The relationship between universities and AR was described by Levin and Greenwood (1998, p. 103) as follows: ‘universities, as institutions charged with the generation and transmission of knowledge, have created a variety of conditions inimical to the practice of action research’. Almost two decades later, the same authors proposed a way to overcome this situation when they argued that ‘action research applied across the range of university organizational structures and dynamics can produce radical and beneficial change for most of the stakeholders’ (Greenwood & Levin, 2016, p. 194). In a nutshell, AR can be used to change universities. But a question emerges when we take both arguments together: How can AR be the engine of change in an organisational setting where conditions are inimical to its practice?

This paper focuses on one specific type of transformation in universities: the development of AR as a pattern of relationship with the territory that democratises knowledge production and fosters development. We approach AR as both the aim and the means of change in a university. Consequently, the problem statement that guides this paper is: In order to effectively do AR with territorial actors (AR as the aim of transformation in a university), action researchers also need to engage in change processes of their own university environments (AR as the means of change in a university); however, the mechanisms involved in these change processes are understudied. The research question that rises from this statement is: How do individual action researchers connect to change in their university’s environment? In answering this question, the paper contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between organisational and individual dimensions in the endeavour to develop favourable conditions for AR in universities. This understanding can be useful for action researchers working in universities who feel that their environments are not always supportive of AR and who are ready to work to improve such conditions.

The discussion in the paper is based on a ten-year process of developing AR at Orkestra-Basque Institute of Competitiveness, a research institute within the University of Deusto (a private university in the Basque Country, Spain). In order to combine the organisational and individual perspectives and see their interactions, part of the case focuses on how the institute and the university have changed, and another part of the case is based on a personal inquiry process of the author that focuses on her individual change process and its interactions with change in the organisation.

The Orkestra case describes how AR has developed from 2008, when only two people (one administrator and one researcher) openly proposed AR in the institute, to gain a relevant position in the institute, with 28% of the institute’s personnel involved in AR processes and 30% of the institute’s 2017 budget coming from projects using AR. These projects are mainly connected to long-term AR processes with two provincial governments, the regional government and the city council of the biggest city in the Basque Country. The stable continuity of all these projects can be considered as an indicator of the quality and outcomes of the AR being developed. Based on the learnings of these previous experiences, today the institute is actively working to generate the conditions for this approach to grow in other spaces of its university. Although goals are being achieved, the paper avoids presenting the transformation process as straightforward or painless and instead focuses on the dilemmas faced within it.

The writing style aims at balancing normative discourses and praxis. Normative discourses can be expressed using sharp arguments and clear political agendas. Praxis, by taking theory to ‘the mud of practice’ (Hajer & Wagenaar, 2003, p. 19), usually looks more contradictory and requires more nuanced arguments.

All persons quoted have given their consent to the use of these specific fragments and have received the paper so that they are aware of how their words are being used.

Theoretical framework

There are various concepts in the AR literature, such as community–campus partnerships or community–university research partnerships (Jackson, 2016; Seifer, 2016), that address how action researchers engage with communities outside the university. But less has been published about how action researchers work within the university in interaction with other academic communities. The way in which AR generates change at the university in order to construct a space for itself and how, simultaneously, AR adapts to the university in order to survive remains, to a great extent, a black box.

Action researchers have published different interpretations of the university as a context for AR. Some report unproblematic contexts that seem to contradict expectations. Klocker (2012), for instance, reports that after worrying because the literature on AR PhDs argued that the knowledge produced in this way was not valued in academic settings, her experience was that supervisors, examiners and departments accepted the legitimacy of her work without any problem. Huges, Denley, and Whitehead (1998) and Maguire (2005) give a very different perspective by reporting difficult situations encountered during their AR PhDs.

Dilemma is the term that Adler (2003) and Stevenson (1991) share when referring to university-based AR courses. Specifically, Stevenson (1991) refers to pedagogical, epistemological and political dilemmas.

For the purpose of the discussion section, this paper summarises the different positions following Bradbury (2010, p. 95):

action research […] lives more or less happily on the margins of conventional social science departments and does this despite its critique of the very values, assumptions and approaches that have grounded university research to date. It is tolerated more and less depending on the context.

Another relevant contribution for the discussion comes from Greenwood and Levin (2016, p. 84), who argue that ‘the lack of organizational self-understanding […] has become a central part of the problem to address’. They analyse the university as comprising various subsystems (teaching, research, student and administrative). Although they recognise that faculty can be part of these various subsystems, they build their discourse on the different logics guiding the different subsystems. One specific dimension that is central to the discussion in this paper is the difference between the research and administrative subsystems.

A useful concept in order to develop the organisational self-understanding of action researchers in university settings is insider AR. When members of an organisation inquire into their own organisation in order to change something within it, they are undertaking insider AR (Coghlan, 2014; Coghlan & Shani, 2015). The concept that helps explain the type of insider AR discussed in this paper is parallel learning structures, which cover interventions

where (a) a “structure’ (that is, a specific division and coordination of labor) is created that (b) operates ‘parallel’ (that is, in tandem or side-by-side) with the formal hierarchy and structure and (c) has the purpose of increasing an organization’s ‘learning’ (that is, the creation and/or implementation of new thoughts and behaviours by employees). (Bushe & Shani, 1991, p. 9)

Freire (2008a) argues that there is no neutral position of educators (researchers), as they either actively seek change or passively reinforce the existing status quo. If we connect this argument with the role of action researchers in their university organisations, we could infer that all action researchers in university environments are insider action researchers on the margins of conventional social science where AR lives (Bradbury, 2010), either actively seeking change in those margins or passively reinforcing the existing status quo.

One of the challenges of insider AR that will be discussed in the paper is role duality, which is synthesised in the following question posed by Coghlan and Brannick (2010, p. 114): ‘How do you balance the potential dilemmas and tugs between your established organizational roles and your researcher role?’ These authors propose the quest for authenticity as the way to cope with duality. This requires attention to the inner (how you think and feel) and outer (expectations from others) dynamics.

The previous contributions frame the case and its discussion by interpreting AR living at the margins of conventional social sciences, where organisational self-understanding is required. Insider AR can potentially serve this purpose.

Presentation of the case: What does changing the university mean at Orkestra?

The normative approach to AR in the case

The case and its discussion are based on a series of events that began in 2008. It would be difficult to understand what such events mean to me and how I construct the discussion in this paper without considering some normative assumptions that influenced me. Thus, this section presents some of these assumptions.

The first normative assumption in the case, which justifies the desirability of AR, is the consideration that a university environment that sustains AR as one strong approach is a university environment that democratises knowledge production in the territory where it operates, enhancing at the same time the efficiency of such knowledge in terms of development (transformation) of the territory.

In order to have AR as a strong approach, most universities need to change. This is where the second normative assumption, expressed in the introductory section comes into play: ‘action research applied across the range of university organizational structures and dynamics can produce radical and beneficial change for most of the stakeholders’ (Greenwood & Levin, 2016, p. 194).

Positioning this second assumption not as the centre of the argument but as a follow-up to the first assumption is a substantial difference from Greenwood and Levin (2016), who focus directly on the transformation of university. In the case presented in this paper, the transformation of university is instrumental to the process to democratise knowledge production in a territory.

What remains a black box in most normative discourses is how what Greenwood and Levin (2016, p. 194) describe as ‘beneficial change’ is going to be achieved. Greenwood demonstrates this uncertainty when he states, ‘We think there is reason to believe that lots of trapped energy for democratic change exists in these organisations [universities]. The issue is how to mobilise it’ (Greenwood, 2017, p. 187) or asks, ‘Can action researchers do this?’ and immediately answers, ‘It remains to be seen’ (Greenwood, 2017, p. 188).

However, the next normative assumption, inspired by Paulo Freire, helps open the black box in the Orkestra case. If AR is to change the university, it needs more power. Still, turning power structures upside down and thus transforming AR from a minority to the new mainstream approach is not necessarily desirable. Making an analogy with what Freire said about revolution, position gained by AR ‘can be lost because of an arrogant excess of certainty on its certainties, because of the consequent lack of humbleness, for the authoritarian use of its power’ (Freire, 2008b, p. 234). Having a democratising normative approach does not prevent AR from potential authoritarianism. If AR is to overcome its actual situation of lack of power, which following Freire we could name as oppression, it cannot opt for a process where it becomes the new oppressor. It needs to generate a process to liberate AR and ideologically opposed research approaches together (Freire, 1996). This implies a dialogical relationship between different research approaches.

Considering these three assumptions, I argue that the case presents a process in which AR is used to transform universities. The aim of this transformation is to gain more space, power and legitimacy for AR in one university as a means for more democratic territorial development. But the goal is not to turn AR into the new mainstream. The goal is to create a constructive tension between different research approaches where their conflicts of interest are made explicit and none of them can be imposed in authoritarian ways.

From this point of view, I consider the results obtained in the case as satisfactory, but I am aware that readers with a different normative framework on how the transformation of universities through AR should happen can interpret the following case in a different light.

AR as an aim and means for change

The University of Deusto is a private university founded in 1886 by the Jesuits, which now has two campuses (Bilbao and San Sebastian) with a total student population of approximately 12,000. Part of the university’s mission statement says that it wants to educate free persons, who will be responsible citizens and competent professionals, having values and abilities that will help them engage in promoting knowledge and transforming society. This mission statement also says that research should be of excellence and related to the interests of society. The university has six faculties (Business, Social Sciences and Humanities, Law, Engineering, Psychology and Education, and Theology). Regarding research, evaluation follows the criteria established by Spanish regulation and emphasises publications in high-impact journals.

Orkestra is a research institute within the University of Deusto focused on researching competitiveness. Today, the institute has 32 professionals in total (15 PhDs, 3 PhD students, 6 research assistants and 8 professionals in administration and support services). The main research field is regional competitiveness, encompassing issues related to welfare, energy, territorial development, innovation, clusters, policy and evaluation. Together with the previously mentioned criteria related to high-impact journals, cogeneration with territorial actors by individual researchers is considered in the evaluation process by the general management.

The institute was created in 2006 as a result of the shared effort of local stakeholders, including the university, public administration (Basque Government, Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa) and private firms. It was created as a university development unit. This means that its status is different from traditional departments and it has more autonomy to define its own strategies and approaches to research.

In the beginning, although the institute’s management claimed that the institute’s mission was to transform the region where the university was located, they hired researchers educated in traditional approaches, which consequently led to a traditional research program. The management team then canvased researchers for proposals on how this traditional approach could be overcome, and an area coordinator and a researcher (the author) proposed AR. AR would change the way the university community related to territorial actors in order to generate democratic knowledge-production processes and effective development (see the first normative assumption). This new approach required two main changes within the institute:

Building capabilities by researchers and managers to interact with territorial actors in nonlinear and cogenerative ways.

Incentivising AR and cogenerative approaches by improving their reputation in the university environment.

In order to achieve these two goals, it has not been sufficient to change the approach exclusively within the institute; thus, institute members are working in three other spaces within the university:

Doctoral courses, in which the generation of AR capabilities has been occurring for two years at the time of writing.

Internal training for researchers/faculty at the university, where a module on how to work with territorial actors is scheduled.

Continuous dialogue of the institute management with the team of the Rector in order to gain visibility for AR (mainly in publications) and improve its reputation.

These changes and the ones taking place inside the institute should be considered as different dimensions of the same process.

The development of AR at Orkestra

In order to share how AR has evolved at the institute, I have delimited five stages. The first four are developed in this section from the perspective of organisational change, and the last one (2016–) is presented later in the paper in the form of my personal inquiry (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Timeline of the development of AR at Orkestra.

The process directly involved approximately 10 researchers or research assistants, but the case focuses on the role of the two individuals who initiated the process. One of them is a researcher who entered the institute in 2006 as the coordinator of one of the departments. She became general manager of Orkestra in 2012 and has supported AR throughout the process from the perspective of management. She characterises the role of administration as presented by Greenwood and Levin (2016), but due to her research background and her efforts to maintain her research activity, she experienced role duality.

She always presented the transformative mission of the institute as something everyone should respond to. Although there were stages when she proposed AR as the most effective approach to transformation, her discourse evolved toward the consideration of AR as one solid way, among others, to be coherent with such a mission. In the first stages of the institute’s development, she incentivised the transfer of researchers focused on traditional approaches back to the university and hired academics with practical experience in development processes that could generate AR approaches. She integrated AR in the institute’s strategy as one more option and supported internal training processes on AR.

The other individual is the author. I entered the institute in 2007 and have been focused on developing AR since 2008. I characterise the role of researchers in developing AR, but my commitment to organisational change (informally up to 2014 and with a formal designation as staff to the institute’s director since then) has led me to also experience role duality. My role combines the coordination of AR processes with stakeholders with the facilitation of insider AR processes to develop AR.

AR with stakeholders (policy makers at local and regional governments) has been ongoing since 2008. In addition, there are two stages (2008–2010 and 2015–2016) during which parallel learning structures were created to develop insider AR processes. The paper mainly focuses on insider AR processes.

2006–2008: Antecedents to the decision to develop AR at Orkestra

I joined the institute in 2007. In 2008, following a proposal that the coordinator of our department and I elaborated, the formal decision was made to use some of the resources of the institute to explore the potential of AR. One of the first steps was to initiate collaboration with a research environment in Agder (Norway).

2008–2010: First organisational attempt to develop AR at Orkestra

As the first step in the collaboration with the Agder environment, I wrote a report on what changes would be necessary in our institute in order to create an AR environment:

We would like to consolidate an action research team at the Institute. Up to now the approach to action research has been proposed by a team of researchers. In the future we would like this to be something assumed by the Institute as part of its unique value proposition.

Extract from the document ‘How we work together and how we want to work together in the future,’ presented in Kristiansand, 4–5 February 2009.

The document shows our desire to transform AR from being the initiative of some researchers into part of the strategy supported by the organisation.

After the visit to Agder, we set a parallel learning structure with, on average, six participants who showed interest in learning more about AR. It was the first insider AR process in the institute. I facilitated this process, and the area coordinator (later the general manager) participated in it. We had almost no experience in AR, and the discussion focused on normative approaches in which the area coordinator and I shared our assumption that AR was a better approach for the transformative mission of the institute than the traditional research in the research program. Even participants in the insider AR group rejected this assumption, arguing AR was neither better nor worse than the other approaches for the institute. I assumed the normative discourse on AR worried them because it might push them into changes they did not feel comfortable with.

The group operated through 2009 but stopped in 2010, when there were differing visions among the participants. Some researchers outside the group expressed their worries about AR being considered a better path to transformation too.

The coordinator of the department recommended me not to continue with the parallel learning structure. She suggested that the researchers who had openly declared that they wanted to do AR should just develop it in specific projects, without making it visible in the organisation. This move reduced normative discussions and strengthened praxis.

2010–2014: The development of AR in specific projects

During this period, AR took a very relevant step in its development with territorial actors (county development agencies and different provincial and regional governments) and was systematised in academic publications (Estensoro, 2012, 2015; Karlsen and Larrea, 2014a, 2014b, 2016, 2017). During this time, two local researchers worked full-time to develop AR in their projects, together with one research assistant.

Because of the collaboration with the Agder environment, at this stage, AR at Orkestra was mostly influenced by pragmatic AR through the work–life research tradition (Emery & Thorsrud, 1969, 1976; Greenwood & Levin, 2007; Gustavsen, 1992; Johnsen, 2001; Pålshaugen, 2004; Toulmin & Gustavsen, 1996). The second main influence in this stage was the work of Paulo Freire (1996, 2008a, 2008b). The group’s approach can be best labelled as ‘action research for territorial development’ (Karlsen & Larrea, 2014b), which combines the previous theoretical influences with ongoing, long-term AR processes involving local and regional governments in the Basque Country since 2008.

AR for territorial development was defined as a pluralistic approach to AR, integrating ‘not a team of action researchers, but rather heterogeneous teams of researchers and practitioners’ (Karlsen & Larrea, 2014b, p. 121). This definition would later be used to make loose interpretations of AR where almost everybody could be included.

2014–2016: Organisational change and the reappearance of AR onstage

At the end of 2012, the coordinator of our department was designated as general manager of the institute. In order to define the unique value proposition of Orkestra, she prepared a document to share with the administration board, in which she wrote:

One of the innovations of Orkestra has been the construction of a new approach to research (Action Research) […] researchers develop a process with the actors that own the competitiveness challenge and combining capabilities of actors and researchers, seek for innovative solutions for problems[…] this singular capability is named a pluralistic approach to action research. (Extract from the document ‘Unique value proposition of Orkestra’, 20 October 2014)

This document gave centrality to AR as the institute’s approach to transformation of the territory, but by arguing its pluralistic interpretation I felt it softened AR.

During this period, I started to serve as staff for the general manager by facilitating a new parallel learning structure that helped insider AR. In this context, I contended to the general manager that emphasis on pluralism – as had been interpreted in the institute – might help expand AR but at the same time lead to a very soft version of it.

She then decided to adopt the term ‘transformative research’ as the core of the shared vision of all members of the institute. AR was presented as one type of transformative research. The use of the term AR and its interpretation in the organisation were thus negotiated and agreed upon.

The second insider AR process took place from 2015 to 2016, and 10 researchers and research assistants participated in this parallel learning structure through a process of monthly workshops. Some of the participants’ aims in the process that serve as examples were: to define a transformative communication approach for the institute through AR; to develop a guide for training processes at Orkestra inspired in educational AR. The framework for the process was inspired by Freire (1996) and his pedagogical approach based on problem posing.

When the process was halfway finished, I delegated its facilitation. It ended in December 2016 as planned, and the evaluation by participants was positive.

An inquiry process on the evolution of AR at Orkestra

This section shares an inquiry that I developed at the end of the second insider AR process, which led to the decision to once more discontinue the open debate on AR in the organisation by closing the parallel learning structure.

By October 2016, after more than a year of having monthly workshops for insider AR, I had contradictory feelings regarding the process and my future efforts to continue developing AR at Orkestra. In order to try to clarify my thoughts and decide on a strategy forward, I decided to have some co-counselling sessions (Marshall, 2016).

First phase of the inquiry: Rethinking legitimisation and radicalness

I chose as my first co-counsellor a colleague whom I felt had influenced my decision to stop facilitating the insider AR process.

In the co-counselling session, I listened to myself express that although we had a very good atmosphere in the meetings, when the process was halfway finished I had not felt legitimised as a facilitator to take the next step. That was the reason I had delegated the facilitation of the process. My argument about lack of legitimacy came as a surprise to her. Several times she asked why, helping me to realise that I had not a coherent answer to that question.

The second colleague to whom I proposed co-counselling was also surprised about my uneasiness when facilitating the group.

I realised that when addressing my co-counsellors’ surprise, I continuously referred to things that had happened in the first insider AR process, which none of the co-counsellors had experienced.

I had my third co-counselling session with a colleague who had been in the process of developing AR in the institute since 2008. He shared his interpretation:

There is a small group of persons [in the institute] which is very committed to the development of the Basque Country. You have a very strong sense of identity and the will to preserve and transform this territory. You see AR as a path, as an instrument for that purpose. Not everybody had this perspective in the group and consequently, only a few could share your perspective to AR.

Second phase of the inquiry: Interpreting the feeling of lack of legitimisation

One of the main difficulties for me was to have a coherent narrative of how, in a friendly and positive environment of emotional support where we had very interesting and challenging discussions, I came up with the feeling that I was not legitimised to further facilitate the parallel learning structure. In order to understand this, I went back to my diaries, as well as the transcripts and minutes from meetings in the second insider AR process.

The following are quotes extracted from the transcript of the meeting on 28 May 2015, the second workshop in the process. One participant noted:

about choosing a position, […] the discourse doesn’t fit for me, I don’t see myself as someone promoting change and democracy, and though in practice I want to change things, this discourse is too big for me, I don’t think I do things to promote social change

Discussing the legitimacy of researchers to enter change processes, this same participant argued:

When you ask yourself about the legitimacy of each participant, in my case I give much more weight to what the politician thinks, […] because they are elected, then, my question is: which is the legitimacy [of the researcher]?

Another participant said:

I don’t want to force AR in Orkestra, I am not drastic […]. I think it should be open.

I think each person should be able to work with their own approach […], respect everybody’s place, for instance, if someone wants to do traditional teaching, that person should be given the space to do it.

I could agree with many of the ideas in the quotes. What shocked me when I read the transcriptions was my difficulty to understand why they were saying it as a reaction to my proposal to discuss different approaches to AR. Even now reading the words pushed, forced, legitimacy and respect makes me ask myself whether they felt I was trying to impose AR on them or on others in the organisation. Another thing that I realised was that this language was already there in the second workshop of the second insider AR process, which meant that it had its origin previous to this process, probably in the first parallel learning structure, as AR had not been part of the debate during the intervening period.

Changes after the inquiry process

The inquiry process helped me to interpret that the pluralistic approach discourse had been, both for me and for the general manager, our way to heal the wounds created in the organisation by the introduction of AR through the first insider AR process. It had probably helped to avoid a break inside the organisation.

But I also concluded that my discomfort with the process came from the perception that, by softening the critical dimension of AR to make it acceptable, we risked reducing the capacity of AR to transform Orkestra. I did not want to work toward a softened version of AR, and I did not feel legitimised by the group to help them develop a more critical perspective. The decision again was to stop facilitating insider AR at Orkestra. As there were no other volunteers to facilitate it, this decision in the intersection of organisational and individual dimensions took AR out of the organisational debate again.

Discussion

In this discussion, I consider two main dimensions of the case in order to reflect on the development of insider AR in university environments. One is the support for AR from hierarchical positions within the management or administration of the university; the other is the level of radicalness in the approach to AR being developed, which influences the capability to be critical to other approaches. I pose the relationship between them as a dilemma, the dilemma of scope of AR in university environments.

AR in university environments develops in a dichotomy with traditional research (Greenwood & Levin, 2007), academic research (Marshall, 2008) or normal science (Coghlan & Brannick, 2010). These are varied names given to ‘the others’, whom we need to understand in order to learn about the space of AR in universities. Following Bradbury (2010), the critique of the very values, assumptions and approaches of the ‘the others’ is intrinsic to AR. Thus, AR coexists in a problematising relationship, and it is precisely this feature of AR that makes it useful in the transformation of universities into more democratic organisations connected to society and its challenges.

This discussion focuses on problematising one specific relationship in the system that was proposed by Greenwood and Levin (2016), namely, the relationship between research and administration in the higher hierarchical positions. What I argue in the following paragraphs based on the case is that there is a kind of self-regulating mechanism in this relationship that prevents its linear development, transforming it into cyclical processes in which role duality and power play determine the path of transformation.

Managers who have responsibilities in university environments usually have responsibilities over a variety of research approaches and communities. Considering that AR is not mainstream, it seems reasonable to think that most managers positively considering AR are probably not action researchers but managers with a pluralistic perspective on research. Pålshaugen (2013, p. 289) defines pluralism as ‘a kind of humility, admitting that deferring one’s own judgement for the benefit of further information and deliberation is preferable when dealing with theoretical issues’. He continues, ‘A bit more sophisticated version of pluralism implies that one is aware that any particular theory, perspective or approach may be understood differently from how one understands it oneself’.

This means that management’s support of AR is usually support that aims at the coexistence of different approaches. This coexistence takes place in a context of implicit or explicit critique by AR of the other perspectives. In a nutshell, this coexistence takes place in a context of conflict.

What the case shows is the readiness of management to apply a softened AR approach in order to reduce conflict in the organisation. This happened even when it was management that had supported AR from the very beginning, possibly influenced by the dual role of the general manager as researcher. In addition, the closeness of action researchers to management, formalised in the dual role of one action researcher as a management staff member, reinforced the softening trend. But this was not the only trend at play. The self-regulating mechanism operated also through the inner conflict that led the action researcher as facilitator of the change process to experience role detachment, that is, feeling like an outsider in both roles (Adler & Adler, 1987; Coghlan & Brannick, 2010).

These mechanisms reinforce the reflection of Greenwood and Levin (2016) on the relevance of roles played by the administrative profiles in hierarchical positions and on their relationship with researchers. But they also problematise this relationship, presenting role duality as a feasible situation and, consequently, arguing that the two communities are not as neatly delimited as the reflection in terms of subsystems might suggest.

Based on the previous discussion, I pose the dilemma of scope of AR in pluralistic university environments: making AR acceptable for a critical mass of university actors in order to use it as a path to transformation of the university can require giving up some of the radicalness and critique implicit in AR. But when doing so, we give up the very feature of AR that generates the capacity to transform. The alternative is to give up scope in the organisation. But could we think that AR can transform a university if it is confined into well-delimited micro environments?

This takes us to the question posed in the introductory section: How can AR be the engine of change in an organisational setting where conditions are inimical to its practice?

Final reflection

It is reasonable to think that at some very important level – unless the academic ecosystem values, supports, incentivises, and rewards AR – the social impact of the AR approach is necessarily dampened.

Should we assume that AR should be the new mainstream in universities we might interpret the dilemma in terms of the unavoidability of the dampening of AR. But following the normative assumptions in the case, AR should be one more approach in universities: strong enough to avoid the authoritarian imposition of other approaches, but not strong enough to be itself imposed in such a way. From this perspective, not full but relative valuation, supports, incentives and rewards of AR by the academic ecosystem could be sufficient. This way, the dilemma might be interpreted not as dampening AR, but as a mechanism to reach a constructive balance between different approaches.

The case showed that insider AR processes can help AR gain support from the academic ecosystem, but it was precisely in those processes when it ran the risk of being domesticated (as in a dialogue process, AR influences other perspectives, but other perspectives influence AR). This was accentuated by role duality, which made positions less clearly delimited. This is the reason why AR needs spaces of its own, which in Orkestra were provided by projects with stakeholders.

what is also to be learned from this paper is that conflict between individual and organisational goals regarding AR is a natural situation in university environments, which sometimes concretises in the relationship between specific action researchers developing their own path into AR and specific managers avoiding conflict in the organisation. The process of constructing agreements over this conflict can be the way to achieve the constructive tension between different research approaches that is interpreted in this paper as a desirable result of AR in the transformation of universities.

Footnotes

Acknowledgement

The author(s) would also like to thank Dr. Kent Glenzer for leading the review process of this article. Should there be any comments/reactions you wish to share, please bring them to the interactive portion of our blog on the associated AR+| ActionResearchPlus website:

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Miren Larrea is a senior researcher at Orkestra-Basque Institute of Competitiveness and lecturer at the University of Deusto (Spain), University of Agder (Norway) and National Technological University (Argentina). She leads Zubigintza, an action reseach lab in Orkestra where she conducts long term action research projects with various regional governments to develop collaborative policy processes. She has published in international journals and books on topics such as action research for territorial development, governance and policy-learning.

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