Researching Organizations using Action Research

Introduction

Since its inception in the middle of the 20th century, action research has gradually gained in prominence. In the last few years, however, there has been an explosion of interest and a concurrent abundance of articles and books about it and using it. The term is used to describe a range of approaches involving interventions in organizations that have the purpose of bringing about practical transformation and advancing knowledge.

A myriad of terms and approaches are used in connection with action research. These include collaborative and participatory research, co-operative, collaborative, appreciative and clinical inquiry and process consultation, process management and soft systems methodology. The field is confused and, despite the numerous attempts to differentiate the approaches (see for example, Argyris and Schon 1991; Elden and Chisholm 1993a; Schein 1995; Raelin 1997), precise interpretations of each seem largely to depend on the user or author and the audience they are playing to.

In this chapter we will be presenting a particular view of action research as a phenomenological methodology for researching organizational processes and practices. From this perspective it naturally sits alongside ethnography (Thomas 1993; Tedlock 2000), case study research (Stake 1995; Yin 2002) and the development of grounded theory (Glaser 1992; Strauss and Corbin 1998; O'Connor et al. 2003). The distinguishing feature of this type of action research, as compared to these other research approaches, is an involvement by the researcher with members of organizations over matters that are of genuine concern to them and over which they intend to take action. By ‘involvement’ we mean taking a role such as facilitator or consultant to a client or clients (or being an employee), having some influence on choices and accepting the accountability and responsibility that this implies. In contrast to most research approaches, which presume the researcher takes a ‘fly-on-the-wall’ perspective, action research presumes that behavioural and/or organizational changes will result from the researcher's involvement. Nevertheless, as with the other research approaches, there is a primary commitment by the researcher to advance a field of knowledge in a manner that has some general implications.

Interventions of this kind will necessarily be ‘one-off's’, so action research has frequently been criticized for its lack of repeatability, and, hence, lack of rigour. These criticisms are countered by the arguments that the involvement with practitioners over things that actually matter to them provides a richness of insight that could not be gained in other ways (Whyte 1991). In addition, because the output derives from close interactions with practitioners it is likely to be of practical value. It, therefore, broadly, at least, fulfils the criteria for the ‘Mode 2’ (i.e. practice-oriented) type of research that has been called for by some organizational researchers (Gibbons et al. 1994; Hodgkinson 2001).

We are especially interested in exploring the particular nature of research rigour and value in situations in which the researcher intentionally is a part of the action. As we suggest above, we distinguish action research as a methodology for researching organizational practice in a number of ways: firstly, from organizational intervention projects that do not satisfy characteristics of rigorous research; secondly, from research within an organization that does not satisfy characteristics of action orientation; and, thirdly, from forms of action research that do not have research output as their primary raison d'être. We shall call this type of action research ‘research [Page 389]oriented action research’ (RO-AR). In making such distinctions, we are not intending to imply that the research approach that we will delineate is better than other forms of research or other forms of action research, but merely that it is a different approach and leads to different outputs.

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