Practitioner Inquiry

Practitioners are managers, teachers, nurses, engineers, doctors or anyone who gets the job done. Practitioners pride themselves on fixing problems, not just looking at or inquiring about things. Even so, practitioner inquiry need not be a contradiction in terms, and action research can help.

[Page 641]Skilled practitioners may well be practised at solving everyday problems that get in the way of getting the job done well. After many years, this becomes instinctual, which is effective, but it can become a problem if the old methods do not solve new problems. David Hume in his Treatise of Human Nature in 1739 said that we are creatures of habit, not reason. So even good practitioners need logical processes to help them overcome the limits of their own instinct and habit to do the same thing over and over. Even Sir Karl Popper recognized the inherent tendency of scientists to only seek information that confirms their own instincts. His version of scientific method (1972) was one way of helping scientists to challenge their own ingrained beliefs and instinct.

Popper’s method works well with some problems, especially those that are within closed systems with relatively simple interactions between the component parts and little impact from outside influences. Practitioners, however, work in what Peter Checkland called in 1982 a ‘human activity system’. They are open systems with complex relationships between the people and components in the systems and the wider environment.

Action research consists of methodologies that can help practitioners address real-world problems by learning by doing when their old methods are not suited to the new problems.