Handbook of Action Research Participative Inquiry and Practice
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2001 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved 0960-085X/01 $15.00 www.palgrave-journals.com/ejis
Book review
Handbook of Action Research Participative Inquiry and Practice By P Reason and H Bradbury (Eds) Published by Sage Publications, London, 2000, 468 pp ISBN 0 7619 6645 5 The first thing to say about this book is that it is a tremendous piece of work: scholarly, concise, even-handed and admirably wide-ranging. The second thing is that it seems on the whole to be more about research and researchers than about action. Action research is one of those oxymoronic terms that seeks to capture a wealth of meanings in a short soundbite-worthy phrase. What is it? The general idea is that research, instead of being situated in ivory tower institutions and mentalities remote from the subject(s) being investigated, should—and this is a more or less moral imperative—be connected with its subjects and should involve them directly. This precludes the separation of research concerns from individual human issues that permit traditional statistical scientific research in a positivist or Popperian (refutationist) vein. It should therefore be a participative undertaking, closely concerned with practical action rather than something done in order to obtain secondary things like technical papers, kudos, and academic advancement. This line of thinking leads to a democratic if not socialist political standpoint, where people—subjects and researchers—are equal in value, however inarticulate, and where practical results are a better measure of effectiveness than the number of times papers are referenced. Similarly, it leads to a philosophical position in which Aristotle’s primacy of the intellectual over the emotional and practical is seen as oppressive, possibly prejudiced and certainly misguided. This position has immediate practical consequences: the action research community writes up its results in a style and with contents that the Establishment simply does not like. Morten Levin and Davydd Greenwood explain: co-generated knowledge means that the professional researcher is only one thinker/actor among many. Ideas are built and tested collaboratively and the attribution of intellectual ‘property rights’ is difficult. In the metabolic structure of universities, professionally authored articles in ‘peer reviewed’ journals are the currency of the realm. Action researchers, with long lists of non-professional collaborators and highly narrativized research reports, are placed in a defensive position . . . Action research, in other words, has a revolutionary agenda. All this is heady stuff, so it is with slightly heavy heart that the reader realises that each chapter of the book—indeed, even the introduction—comes with a complete academic apparatus: a page at least of references to books and papers, a densely-argued narrative, appeals to authority, statements of position and the sound, just audible in the distance, of axes being ground. In the name of the people, the tyrant of scientific method is overthrown—to be replaced
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