Action Turn, The

The Call for an Action Turn

Significant changes in the course of direction in a field can be characterized as ‘turns’, or moments when old problems and paradigms are challenged by new ones. The social sciences have recently been challenged by the postmodern turn, the linguistic turn, the narrative turn, the reflective turn and the performative turn, among others. Of particular significance for the action research community is a call to social scientists for an ‘action turn’ towards studying themselves in action and in relation to others. Taking the action turn means taking seriously the connections between experience, human participation and the generation of knowledge, despite the claim of traditional science for the need to distance ourselves from action in the name of objectivity.

Bringing action to the centre of the research process, the action turn represents a broad invitation to social science researchers to accept the legitimacy of action research as social science research. An important development in that direction has taken place as current [Page 19]classifications of paradigms of qualitative research have started to include the action and participatory paradigm as a legitimate and distinct approach to interpretive inquiry. In calling for an action turn in social science, Peter Reason and William Torbert explicitly argued that the purpose of inquiry is to develop a connection between knowledge and the personal and social experience of action, so that it is responsive to human persons, their communities and their social and cultural ecologies. Once social science takes the action turn, research cannot be merely about describing reality but, instead, is about human participants inquiring to transform reality, supported by their inquiry.

In doing action research, action researchers have already taken the action turn, independent of their diverse approaches. Their practice is grounded in the shared epistemological assumption that action is key to knowledge generation and thus essential to the process of research as well as its primary goal. In this view, knowledge emerges from engaging in the world and becomes a means to guiding subsequent actions, more than an end in itself.

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