Artfulness in the Organisational Playground: Actions and choices-Editorial

The previous time the Action Research Journal dedicated a similar Special Issue on the arts was in 2011 (Brydon-Miller et al., 2011). Then, there was a feel of something new, indeed ‘uncharted territory’ as Chris Seeley (2011) pointed out. Authors explored ‘extended epistemologies’; richer and wider ways of knowing beyond text to take seriously our intuitive grasp of how we engage with the world in other presentational forms. At the time, this seemed to require assertive advocacy and justification in a world dominated by conventional, positivist social research; the model of objectivist ‘hard’ science. What we see here in this Special Issue is something different. We see a shift from justification to the constructive question of: how can we bring about artfulness in our research and practice to create impact? We see a new confidence (tinged with vulnerability) as authors show how valuable the arts are. In other words, we see a fuller legitimacy for artful practice taking its rightful place in action research at this time.

The following Special Issue is intended therefore to support action researchers’ enthusiasm and confidence to try things out, to create ripples and to enable them and others to see their world differently. These ripples disrupt. They are political; they challenge power relations, they make room for different voices. We get to see what has not been seen. New actions among new participants become visible, become possible.

Artfulness is to be seen as a facet of practice, it is grounded in experience in what German author and scientist Goethe called ‘delicate empiricism’ (Cottrell, 1998). There is an increased emphasis on the process of careful attention (in its many forms) brought to life in artful practice. There is less (but not zero) attention to theory, concepts and the abstract as they can draw attention away from our experience of the world.

We asked contributors to address their research to the organisational playground, a place that we described in our Call for Papers as being ‘creative, imaginative, and childlike places, but for some it might bring memories of coercion, oppression, and power’ and we can see this in each paper.

How then do these insights help us in relation to action research generally and Action Research for Transformations (ART) specifically? We will focus our answer to the latter ART, a call to action and ‘refreshed understanding’ (Bradbury et al., 2019b) for action researchers the world over. ART puts the perils that the world faces centre stage. As educators, researchers and knowledge creators we are reminded that we have a responsibility to act. In ushering in a new emphasis for the journal in 2019, ART invited a shift in the balance of research towards ‘relational, collaborative learning processes with experiments to provoke future learning?’ (Ibid, p4). This emphasis in turn brought a refreshing of the choice points by which we select papers for the Journal (Bradbury et al., 2019a). Returning to the question, how has this Special Issue illuminated this new agenda and the practices we need, we find words of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein helpful:

Not only rules, but also examples are needed for establishing a practice. Our rules leave loop-holes open, and the practice has to speak for itself (Wittgenstein, 1969, paragraph 139).

When ‘practice has to speak for itself’ it often does so with a soft voice. We suggest that you listen carefully. A focus on artfulness in its various forms brings practice to life be it in the artefacts as ‘physical interlocuters’ (i.e. objects that channels our thoughts and feeling between people) or as practices of social interaction that come with organising. So, what is the nature of this work? In the physical objects that we encounter (films, magazines, pictures, etc.), we sense a bridge of inter-reflexive work between people by the communal noticing and conversations they enable. Yet on the other hand, we see with Meer (2022) these artefacts can also be deeply personal in their reflexive work.

Many people feature in this Special Issue including migrant women, a commissioner of civic projects, consultants, workshop participants, the authors and us as editors. All of us have one thing in common, we are all entwinned in a mesh of power relations with each other that results in this artefact – the Special Issue. These are processes of organising (or even organisings), mundane and often unnoticed in everyday interactions. Bradbury and others (Bradbury et al., 2019b) make the point that ‘constant attention and reflection on what is being done, to uncover unrecognised assumptions’ is needed to understand the power dynamics at play. Once understood, choices and actions become available. And here, we can see how artfulness makes a contribution.

We have selected five papers for this Special Issue, each of which brings something new and refreshing to action research. Here, we give an overview of the papers and offer some thoughts as to what they say more broadly. We have already mentioned extended epistemology and creative expression but there is another theme, that of bridge building in the form of relationships and trust. Through artful work, we see how these relationships enabled connections and sense to be made in the creation of knowledge and to judge the quality of that knowledge in inter-subjective and relational ways. For readers looking for something new in the action research literature, Jensen (2022) introduces us to action research from a Scandinavian perspective by exploring the ideas of Eiler Løgstrup, Kari Martinsen and others less well known in the English-speaking world. Meanwhile, Schneider (2022) builds bridges between action research and social construction and other forms of insight with the work of thought leaders more well known to English speakers, John Shotter and Erin Manning.

The authors share an attention to being close to the grain of experience. In doing so, we see a tension between the joy and a melancholic pain of their research; the joy often coming from the work that the contributors love and the real-life benefits they enable. On the other hand, we see a pain that emerges from working within constraints and limitations of their system.

Meer draws a vivid connection between her practice and the organisation drawing on the work of Frederic Laloux, Otto Scharmer, Peter Senge and others to highlight challenges we face in the wider world. Meer takes us carefully through her imaginal knowing and how this links with her learning as she navigates vulnerability and confidence in sharing this with others including her clients. She goes on to explore the process of inquiry and how it offers a ‘liberating disruption of the ordinary’. We then see this from the angle of the organisation and the client in her role as a facilitator and how the choices made connect participants to large scale problems of the world such as migration and climate change.

Through a series of drawings and art featuring birds we get a window into Meer’s (2022) artful practice as she engages and makes choices in the world and in doing so we walk with her as she explicates her own reflexivity in her role as a facilitator in organisations. Here, she explains the work required in her imaginal process of awareness explaining that whilst ‘… a child may live in the imaginal world more naturally, for me it takes effort to reach into this tacit realm and to develop findings into new knowing’.

If Meer (2022) explores artful practice and imaginal, knowing the following two papers from Jensen (2022) and Schneider (2022) explore further notions of how we understand our world with others and the choices that these reveal that might otherwise go unnoticed in the hurly burly of our everyday world.

Jensen (2022) takes us to two workshops as venues to explore the social and individual implications for artful practice. None of us are a blank canvas when we show up at work and here Jensen takes us through how her previous career as a professional musician has implications for her today in how she engages, interprets and responds to the world. It is a social process from which novelty emerges. These are tacit ways of knowing that are all too difficult to pin down. Jensen provides refreshing ways to usefully describe these processes such as the ‘chink’ that opens up between how we sense (or attune to) the world in a professional context and how we interpret and understand what we have sensed. Drawing on Løgstrup, she gives voice to sensory awareness of ‘moods, sounds, atmosphere, smells and colors’ as ways to learn and react to what is going on in our organisational life. The paper offers a stark backdrop against what counts for professional practice in an era of neo-liberalism where explicit, codified and measurable knowledge wins out. Jensen concludes with a series of useful insights that help us to find the words to change this debate.

So far, we have explored imaginal ways of knowing and sensory awareness and embodied attunement in action research. This sets us up well to discuss the nature of experience, those fleeting moments that we all too often miss in favour of the broad sweep of the bigger narrative.

Schneider (2022) considers the work of noticing, or in her own words, experience that is ‘teeming with indeterminate, unresolved, fleeting relations activity’. It is the small detail that is all too easy to miss that she pays attention to before it becomes reified in post-hoc rationalisation. It is what happens out of the corner of the eye. It is mundane, but not uninteresting; that is the key. In one narrative, we hear about her walk to a bookstore with someone she works with; there is an awkwardness and things that are yet to be said, shoes that we have all walked in. She explores the nature of experience from a number of angles. These include the Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector to explore what it means to come into being as well as John Shotter’s notion of ‘withness thinking’. For Schneider, there is artistry in how we stay close to the unfolding nature of experience and how we develop our ability to recount such events. What transformative potential does this hold for the action researcher? Possibly we can write and account for experience with a sense of events yet to come, to offer the reader moments of life being lived. Good action research often does this; but the conceptual landscape this paper offers can only help, encourage and give voice to this work.

With Goedhart (2022) and French and Curd (2022) we see the practical realities and examples of Participatory Action Research (PAR) of artfulness in the organisational playground, the former in our recently created digital world, the latter harking back to 1960s, 70s and 80s. In both papers, there are things that we can actively do in the world around us, to take forward and play. And from this, we can create some form of benefit and change.

In Goedhart’s paper (2022), we see the emancipatory benefits of creating video blogs, or vlogs. Here, the organisational playground is writ large and small from a city and its commissioning administration down to the micro level of the practical work giving voice to disadvantaged citizen; and the tensions that exist between the two. When boiled down, the question is: what is worthwhile and of value, and who has the power to decide this? As an example, the author explains how they decided ’… to film hands rather than faces’, a small detail but of significant importance to the migrant women in the programme and their cultural sensitivities. This was an approach that was co-constructed, a point where agency and power shifted to the participants. And then, there were the serendipitous benefits, particularly amongst the migrant women groups in encouraging them to speak the language of their new country and develop their IT skills. Yet we wonder how much of the fine detail that is of real value is lost when the work is described at a larger scale to the commissioners of the work.

As with Goedhart, we are exploring co-creative activities with French and Curd (2022) but here we get our hands sticky in the real world of ‘cut’n’paste’ in the creation of zines. They go back to a tradition seen in the last century where marginalised communities and the counter culture produced creative, cheap and easily shareable stories, information and ideas on paper. The authors’ research is based in a museum, working with people who have often been ignored. That said, we can see application of the methods in far wider organisational settings. They draw on the work of the South American educationalist Paulo Freire, in paying attention to the activity of creating ‘horizonal dialogue’ of trust building, knowledge, action and agency thus challenging more paternalistic presentations on knowledge and power. It is important to note that the paper is personal, we see people at work and can share for a moment their creativity. This relates not only to the research ‘subjects’ but also the researchers working together in ways that challenge the positivist distinction between the two camps. In our digital world, this way of working is different and fun and will create shareable memories.

During finalisation of the Special Issue Hilary Bradbury, Editor in Chief, challenged us with a question: how does artfulness help transformations happen at a time of eco-social crisis? In other words, what’s the “so what?” for this Special Issue at this time. It was an invitation to consider how our insights would be taken up more generally at a larger scale, in short, what is the connection between the work we do and the impact it creates. It is an important question. At its heart are mismatches of understanding, on the one hand as action researchers we are motivated by relational, collaborative and emancipatory ways of working. Yet on the other hand, there is the predominant world view amongst policymakers that values objective expertise and of the scientific way of detached contextless knowledge. This is what counts in policy circles that attracts large scale funding. Of course, we know that this is not clear cut, we are talking about emphasis. As action researchers, we need to join the debate and walk in the shoes of policymakers, funders, scientists, politicians, etc.; and to encourage them to explore dialogic and relational ways of knowing. The Special Issue suggests we might take an anthropological approach drawing on the likes of Margaret Mead and Clifford Geertz. They emphasise the importance of exploring the practice and cultures of others to make their ‘strange’ world familiar to us. And in a further and vital twist to enable us to see our own culture in a new light; to see our familiar world as being strange. In Geertz’s view, our focus should be on ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz, 1973). In sharing our curiosity of the world with policymakers, we invite curiosity of our domain so we can build a communal sense of what is of value, relevance, feasible in a complex world that creates impact. How might art help in this? For the most part, art results in artefact; we can point to things. Each artefact has stories and people and those people are relational beings, they interact and change is possible. Instead of looking for the large abstract sweep of change from Policy X that leads to outcome Y, let us influence the debate and pay close attention to the small steps of how one slight relational change comes to interact with another and here art (and ART) has a role to play.

One further thought about our own editorial practice. The process of creating a scholarly journal typically sits behind a cloak of anonymous peer review which encourages scientific detachment. This is an enactment of a worldview where quality is assured from afar instead of being a relational practice of critical (inter)subjectivity. Clearly there is good reason for this. And so, after a rigorous first round of anonymous review for all papers, we innovated a little and bought some artfulness to our practice. We made choices that allowed us to navigate a path that holds true to both the principle of good quality research and to be relational in ways that come alive in conversation. After the first anonymous review, we invited each author to a conversation with the editorial team. And if they were up for it, we invited reviewers as well. There were still issues of power as final decisions had yet to be made for many of the papers, but we were struck as to how many of the authors were keen to take up the invitation, even those who knew that their work had not been accepted for the Journal. Initial feedback was positive, people felt heard and their work respected. We noticed an artful spark come alive in conversation that is not quite there in the written word; sometimes a short hesitation, an emphasis on a word or small gesture, all fleeting yet so important in our creativity. Indeed, this is a point that Schneider (2022) covers in her paper too. Early reflections on the process show an enthusiasm for such conversations. They also supported authors with making a few final changes. For us as editors, it felt like we honoured the work of all the authors.