Abstract
Action research reconnects knowing and doing in formal and informal learning contexts in support of desired change. Action researchers seek to empower stakeholders to grapple with relationships of power that uphold the status quo. The editorial starts by situating contemporary action research within the wider social science endeavor.
Action research and its place in conventional social science
‘Never has so much been published by so many to the benefit of so few.’ In situating action research I paraphrase Churchill 1 to suggest that conventional social science scholarship benefits few and may even contribute to our planetary problems. Social science scholars in particular remain beholden to - and personally burdened by – the rewards and targets of a social science paradigm that encourages waste of intellectual resources. To the degree that publication standards continue to enforce a modernist logic in which they write about stakeholders, not enough for and almost never with them, mainstream scholarship contributes to a chasm between thinking and doing, research and action. In its way conventional scholarly norms apply a Modernist and extractive logic within the domain of knowledge creation as did does colonial and ecological plundering carried out under the Modernist banner of “progress.” In the meantime, the stakeholder about whom the scholar writes progresses with little benefit of scholarship as they remain unengaged. Emotion being our basis for engagement with the world the conventions of objectification and intellectualism are deeply misguided when always applied; humans are emotional creatures, with hands as well as brains.
As Kurt Lewin – a progenitor of action research - would put it, our Modernist systems are frozen. Their unresponsiveness describes the learning and knowledge creation systems of education and research. Therefore, we witness institutional inability to respond to the sustainability crisis we face. Yet a majority of planetary boundaries have been crossed just in the past decade. 2 As ecological boundaries are transgressed deeper entanglement with social, economic, gender, racial, and intergenerational injustices increases. This destruction of ecological beauty and wholeness is happening alongside a recent re-arising of nationalism, to reveal simultaneously a globalizing and increasingly polarizing world. It is time to accept an unpalatable truth: our mainstream approach to scholarship actively co-produces the very opposite of what we need at this time of unsustainability.
Supporting the Great turning toward an ecological society
To support a Great Turning, (Korten, 2007; Macy, 2009), which is also explained as an epochal shift from industrial modernity to postindustrial meta-modernity (Freinacht, 2017) many more citizens will have to live according to ecological principles. Yet ecological living is not supported by current structures, for example, reward systems do not signal true costs. Many more politicians will have to advocate for sustainable policy even as politics is increasingly captive to economic elites. Intergenerational justice is compromised.
Transformation comes alive through citizens’ actions and conversations, when seeing and acting within relational, ecological processes. This requires a type of knowing and doing beyond the expert norms created by 15th Century non-relational men who established the Modernist academy. Under those reductive materialist rules perennial spiritual verities were abandoned resulting in epistemological vandalism with an associated view of the living world as mere inert matter to be exploited. This view and its associated methodologies are no longer fit for purpose.
How then - in what manner - are knowledge creators to help make transformations happen? A short answer – the one on which this journal was founded over two decades ago - is to orient toward knowledge creation that arises in a context of practice and requires researchers to work with practitioners on issues of practical concern. An even shorter answer: action research with a transformative orientation. Action researchers have a unique contribution to make. Now is our time.
Special issues in response to planetary crisis
Since the journal refreshed its mission (Bradbury et al., 2019) we develop and publish those papers that respond to the planetary crisis. We continuously look to increase impact and proliferation of action research, undertaking developmental steps especially with special issues.
We just celebrated a special issue in March on action research for transforming the poverty field. It was initiated as a collaboration between the Action Research journal (ARJ) and the International ATD (All Together in Dignity) Fourth World Movement, which is dedicated to the eradication of extreme poverty. The editorial (Friedman et al., 2024) introduced a relational view of poverty as a social “field” composed of patterned relationships among individual and institutional actors that generate a core experience of suffering. The papers of this issue point to how the poverty field can be transformed when people living in poverty act as agents of their own liberation through action research in partnership with other stakeholders. However, they also teach us that transformation requires fundamental changes in the “rules of the game” (be they institutional or scholarly) so that people experiencing poverty can join into critical inquiry with scholars and other stakeholders on equal footing, making knowledge creation emancipatory rather than extractive.
The upcoming special issue (Bartels, Wittmeyer et al., 2023) will further establish the need for fundamental societal transformations with a focus on the role of social innovations of a type that are changing social practices both among humans and between human and non-human actors. Those selected papers - currently within peer review - will zoom in on those action research practices and processes through which social innovations are co-produced and through which they become transformative for a broader context.
There is an end of July deadline for a special issue that examines the shift in mindsets within and among action researchers doing transformative action research work. The call for papers (Divecha, et al., 2024) is an invitation to turn the camera around and to note sensemaking patterns, conducive and not, for transformations. It is an invitation to explicitly explore the often non-linear inner development informed by the values that animate our work as well as beliefs and mindsets that act as catalysts and enzymes of transformation. Theory such as constructivist adult development and multiples ways of knowing may help explain the power of collective intelligence as we endeavor to inquire about what allows us be with the depth of beauty, love and wholeness all around us while simultaneously challenged, enlivened and energized by global and local polarization, ecological and social crises.
All three special issues seek to highlight and link different levels of research – personal, interpersonal and impersonal - in ways that bring relevance to otherwise “objective” accounts, but also deal with the possible blinkering partialities of personal, subjective accounts. Typical of action research is to emphasize the importance of the interpersonal – group – field in which self-correction can happen in dialogue and coordinated activity becomes possible. Action research is both a path of self and other development. As we learn to collaborate perhaps also a cure for the epidemic of loneliness.
Action researchers are themselves agents of external change and subjects of internal change. Excessive self-consciousness with its inbuilt reflexivity can become self-correcting rather than self-indulgent when we reflect on learning with others in the context of relationships and experiences shared. At the journal we define this as developmental reflexivity. We – who are implicated in problem and solution - can bring this reflexivity to ambitious horizons.
Action research is integrative
The objectivity of scientific Modernism has yielded powerful progress, for example, in medicine that extends human lifespan, but cannot now also solve the accompanying problems of progress if construed without we ourselves as part of the problem and solution. We, the action researchers, are not separate from the field in which we work. Helping transformations happen means proliferating relational solutions – born in relationship - through policy making and/or new organizational structures.
Renewing our acquaintance with the field theory of Kurt Lewin (1951) we are reminded that our social world is not made up of atomistic things, but rather of energetic configurations within social space that connect people and are created through interaction among them. Relational fields are created by people, but once formed, they take on a life of their own, inheriting received conventions that powerfully shape people who internalize and reproduce conventions through their thinking, feeling, and actions (Friedman et al., 2018).
Action research, to be transformative then, transforms by connecting: (a) the individual and institutional actors who constitute the field; (b) within a relational space among these actors, with a particular focus on transforming power toward mutuality; (c) requiring the erstwhile invisible “rules of the game” to become conscious as regimes of sensemaking and emotion that govern action; and (d) reconnecting meaning making with action taking in the form of active experiments through which new fields are co-created. Dialogue within a relational space that emphasizes self-inquiry is at the heart of this relational space. The value of relational work is not readily appreciated by a Modernist expert mind yet may be one of the more time-consuming aspects of action research. As simple as dialogue or relational work of trust building may sound, we see everywhere evidence that humanity has yet to trust much less take steps to learn that we can renounce violence and tolerate diverse beliefs and even be better off for it. Therefore, bringing stakeholders together around a common agenda is the magic sauce of action research for transformations. Relational and trust building processes lie well below the surface of more readily seen tactics of change, such as rewards and targets. Yet the power of relational processes becomes more obvious when we social innovations such as citizen assemblies, themselves working as and withing small group processes to produce national level change and interpersonal transformation. These allow intuitive knowing to come into consciousness and help those involved see the transformative power of collaboration come alive. As an example from the Irish context, a citizen assembly helped produced the world’s first popular vote to legalize gay marriage. The assembly leveraged transformative dialogue in small groups into dialogue among institutional actors. That this happened in an erstwhile conservative, theocratic country suggests the possibility of producing swift, non-linear shifts (Bradbury, 2022). Targeting political, policy and change leader-learners is a requirement if the hard work of deliberation prototyped by “average” concerned citizens is to is take root and be extended.
Elevating impact through widening circles of awareness
If we are serious about achieving the transformation we need to regenerate the planet and deliver social justice. Now is the time for more of us to consider refocusing/refreshing/regenerating scholarly-practice so that action research may flourish in responding to our planetary crisis.
Action research integrates individual with change at the organizational, institutional, and social levels because transformation involves individual and social changes that feedback on one another. Knowledge creation in the action research methodology is the growing ability to widen one’s circle of attention and absorb what one comes upon even when sometimes shaking cherished beliefs. It’s done in relationship.
At the same time we see government mandated consent processes for large scale (and costly) infrastructure projects (e.g., windfarms) are becoming common. Overcoming conflict/polarization within a commitment to peaceful means is hard work. There is a need for more action researchers to develop their internal capacity for bring their talents and skills, also their resilience, in the face of discord and upset, and serve to untangle fraught spaces and connect actors and institutional change.
Now is the time for more courage and aspiration in our work and to see it as a generational project. In the words of ecologist Arne Naess, now is the time to be optimistic, for the 22nd Century.
Introduction to this issue
Next I introduce the articles of the second issue of 2024, each of which brings them to life aspects of my foregoing editorial.
Chris Riedy (2024) offers a book review that is deeply relevant to this editorial as it offers an update on the Limits to Growth but made applicable to action researchers.
We then see a next phase in co-operative inquiry with Reason’s (2023) extended definition of persons in the more-than-human world – and indeed the cosmos itself – as sentient and responsive. His paper tells of a series of co-operative inquiries with human and river persons worldwide. It expands the philosophical basis for action research by drawing on living cosmos panpsychism. In terms of practice we learn of encounters with animals who appear at our river encounters, with reflections on the veracity claims we are making.
Fairey et al. (2022) acknowledge the elemental need to work with stakeholders and they also problematize what can appear as a simple cure all. They point out that the sensemaking that drives participation can be extractive, a Modernist old wine in new bottles that carries over the extractive nature of mainstream research methods. Participation itself does not guarantee against extraction. However, integrating mixed-methodologies can help different research stakeholders attain desirable, fruitful and meaningful levels of ownership and build inclusive rigor. The result is participatory research that is attuned to the complexities of conflict-affected settings, inclusively rigorous and potentially transformative.
Butler et al. (2023) illustrate the importance of reflexivity with reference to theory about interiority and Constructive Development Theory (CDI). These allow for handling complexity and ambiguity – which are intrinsic to our polycrisis. They present two case studies in which researchers engaged in applying CDI for transformation. Both cases highlight, through first-person action-research and reflexive collaboration, that although the will to address developmental transformational challenges was an espoused motivation, its misalignment with the capacities for transformative change is always a possibility. Applying CDI reveals the nature of the challenge (time, effort and support), how transitions were made, and the potential for transformational impact.
Jacobs and Cuba (2023) write of spiritual care as an example of work that is both new and needed on the professional landscape but often missing in health care. They tell of the challenging work of chaplains working in health care, who hold spiritual care at the heart of their profession but do not feel rooted in a strong professional identity. However, as in so much work that comes in response to the transformation of Modernity, it also results in destabilization of those who are called to be change agents. This perhaps speaks for action researchers everywhere, who are called to be resilient within as old, often lauded, identity is cultivated to facilitate generativity.
As a consequence of this editorial as well as the recent and upcoming special issues mentioned, a next iteration of quality choicepoints will be updated by the members of the ARJ editorial team. These will appear in the review portal later this year alongside a freshly articulated statement of ARJ mission aims & scope. Check out the related blogs and video snippets on ActionResearchPlus.com.
Hilary Bradbury, PhD, is founding Editor in Chief at Action Research and also the curator at AR+ the Action Research Plus Foundation.