Action Research

Gaining access

Let us go back to our example of you as a PhD student involved in work as an HRM project assistant. One of the features of action research is that it is a collaborative approach that provides the people/company/organization with the means to take systematic action themselves in order to resolve specific problems or develop some activity within the workplace/organization or group. In order to get there, the first step for you as a researcher is to get an idea of the field, to design the project as research in action through iterative activities and identify the research questions. For that purpose, both general and practical knowledge of the field and prior theoretical knowledge are needed.

Often, mere access is not enough; a more formal, written research contract for you as an action researcher within an organization is needed, to gain recognition within the organization and among the group of people you will be working with. For that contract, information of the key stakeholders in organization, their expectations and possibly differing opinions should be recognized, as changes are not always wished for by all members of an organization. For example, Bartunek et al. (2000) provide a complex case of a manufacturing company where the development of an integrated manufacturing system through action research did involve major changes in how the firm operated its business; the role of researcher can get very complicated when suggesting possible changes but not having the power to control the changes or their effects.

The roles in the research object in action research depend on a variety of things. Access is one of them: it is not always easy to get access to an organization if you are not part of it. There are a growing number of action research projects being done and reported where practising managers themselves are undertaking the action research project in and on the context of their own organizations (e.g. Bartunek et al., 2000), e.g. when enrolled as participants in academic education programmes and MBAs. This has also evoked criticism towards action research. The question of who defines the problems in organizations and companies to be investigated has been put forward, especially within accounting research, where there has been a longer tradition than within the marketing discipline with action research (e.g. McSweeney, 2000).

Framing the research question and action-oriented activities

It is important to note that your own research question for the PhD work and the specific problems of the individual/company/organization are not necessarily the same. Quite often they are close enough to each other, but quite often these two diverge at some point in the research process. It is equally important to understand that your task, first of all, if your research follows the logic of action research, is to solve or help find solutions to the specific problems of the company/organization and, in that process, engage persons involved in the process of finding solutions. The question of who selects the topic and range for research is important, and very often the action researcher can have a steering group as a ‘helping hand‘, both providing the inside knowledge and history of the organization and helping in planning, gathering the meetings, implementing and reflecting the project.

When you start to work as a project assistant for the development of human resources and plan your project, you should also have some pre-understanding of the company environment. Pre-understanding also refers to the knowledge that you as a researcher bring into the project. Is there a difference between action research and more grounded-theory-inspired research? A need for a pre-understanding of theoretical issues and an active role in the research most likely direct your interest away from the possibility of adopting the grounded theory approach, as described in Chapter 11. Action research is specifically useful when researching process-related problems in organizations, such as learning and change. Gummesson (2000) stresses the need for business and management research to be in touch with the practice, and there is not always a big difference between the roles of academic research and management consultant.

Implementing action research

When you develop the research plan, you should remember that, in action research, the whole research process is iterative: The planning is followed by acting, observing and reflecting, with a revised plan, acting, observation and reflection following again, most often in real time and not retrospectively. Many times, corrective and additional measures are needed as a consequence of the revisions. This process is often described as a spiral of self-reflection, leading to new cycles of replanning, new actions taken and reflecting again, etc. In reality, these stages often overlap and the process of research consists of overlapping activities, where one stage is not clear-cut from the next one. Even if the parts do become partly overlapped, the iterative nature of action research is an important part of the research project, as the change in the researched setting or the data-gathering process are impossible to finalize in a short period of time and with only a short interval of data gathering at the site. Therefore, the actual research process can take much longer than originally anticipated in the research design process.

A retrospective approach is possible, e.g. a when real-time case is being written retrospectively, and used as an intervening learning in the organization (Kleiner and Roth, 1997). Action research, it is hoped, will lead eventually to ‘re-education‘, changing patterns of thinking and action. This depends naturally on the participation of research subjects in identifying new courses of action. It is intended to contribute both to academic theory and to practical action. The characteristics most often are defined in terms of outcomes and processes.

Coughlan and Coghlan (2002) distinguish the pre-step activity (1) (understanding the context and purpose) from six main steps (2), which are (a) to gather, (b) to feed back and (c) to analyse the data, (d) to plan, (e) to implement and (f) to evaluate the actions taken (Box 13.1), and finally from a meta-step (3), which is the academic research, e.g. the dissertation phase. The rationale for the pre-step comes from the empirical surroundings and the ‘academic’ reasoning for why it is important to study the phenomenon in question.

What about persons working in the company where you are about to develop new HRM standards and practices? How and to what extent should they become part of your research project? According to Kemmis and McTaggart (2005: 563), ‘if practices are constituted in social interaction between people, changing practices is a social process‘. Action research focuses on actual practices and processes, and in that sense the real material world with specificities and practices that are rooted in specific situations is present. Thus, in your action research, the HRM practices that need to be changed will necessarily involve the persons working in those departments, with the tasks concerned in your research. Therefore, their informed consent is necessary for your research project. In action research it is particularly important to ask for informed consent from all participants, not only from management.

Action research most often involves the kind of learning process with material changes following that learning. Most often it is the researcher who initiates the action research project, not the organization; but, during the course of the research project, expert knowledge of the theories and research field in question and local knowledge of the members meet beneficially.

How to increase the validity of your research project?

As has become apparent, the nature of problem solving varies a lot within action research, and no one single claim for validity can be put forward alone for the project (Box 13.2). However, as mentioned earlier, the ‘closeness and interrelated nature of a research project and solving real-life problems‘, and slowly emerging research questions and results can cause more voiced claims for validity in action research than with other qualitative research projects. In spite of the general applied nature of business research in general, strong research streams in business research exist that do not see that the role of business research lies in the practical problem solving of business life, but in theory building without close connections to ‘real life‘.

There are several advocacies for the close relationship between consultancy and research, while others argue that there are differences that need to be taken into account. Some even argue that ‘action research is masqueraded consulting’ with little connections to research. The aim of making the line between, for example, participatory action research and consulting more clear-cut is demanded, for example, within critical ethnography. Gummesson (2000) puts forward four points regarding differences between consultancy and an action research project:

1.
Research requires theoretical justification, whereas consultancy requires empirical justification. Therefore, they cannot be the same.
2.
Consultants who work with action research need to implement more rigorous inquiry and documentation. In that, they gain professionally, but research remains ‘intact’ in that process and cannot be ‘harmed’ by consultancy.
3.
The difference between consultancy and action research is in their ways of dealing with the process of the project. Whereas consultancy is linear, action research is cyclical, and requires more time.
4.
Consultants work with a tighter time budget. Consultants move to the next case after one is solved, whereas researchers might remain attached to their materials and revisit their case over time.

The closeness of actions to research and the interrelated nature of research and action make it impossible to draw a clear-cut line between the two. This puts perhaps more emphasis on the clarity of the conceptual-based arguments that you need to develop within your action research project. Action research has also been found to be [Page 205]an important empowerment tool within groups of people who are disadvantaged or do not have a voice for expressing their needs. Education research, as well as migration research and feminist research are all examples of field, where action research has been used actively and successfully.

How to proceed and finalize your project?

How then to proceed with your research project, given that you have access to your organization and consent to work with your project? In your project you should be able to focus on practices in a concrete and specific way that makes them visible for discussion and reflection and, thus, also visible for change in your target organization. It is quite usual that action research is a practically and collaboratively oriented research activity, and that it engages people in exploring their own practices of communication, production, co-working and co-organizing their activities. You should, therefore, have built a trust relationship within the organization, have the informed consent of the people who are engaged in different HRM activities and be involved in organizational settings in order to have sufficient knowledge and insight of the key activities that need to be developed further.

It is easiest to think of action research as a process. The first task is to get the researched organization/group/community to discuss ‘internally’ their possible problems or issues that need to be developed. This often requires a lot of work and open and good meetings and gatherings, as it is not easy to get the time and space for reflection organized within a busy group of people.

Thinking of your HRM PhD project and work as an assistant, it is probable that, by examining the previous ways of taking care of and organizing HRM activities, by knowing of the key events and critically examining earlier activities, and by making a plan for development and change, it is possible to open up discussion on the ways for improving previous ways of dealing with HRM questions and developing new practices and introducing HRD activities. You can gather materials for your project and for the development action in the company by interviewing, observing, analysing the existing documents, etc. You can also use focus group discussion in producing relevant questions. One leading question you would need to put forward for discussion could be of the type ‘what kinds of problems do you face in HRM activities?’ The variety of possible materials also suggests that there is no single way to do action research and gather research materials for it.

Your task would then be to gather information, analyse it and interpret the information you have gathered. The analysis will depend on the data-gathering methods you have used and the way you approach your action research project. For example, ways to analyse interview data from focus groups and ethnography are discussed in Chapters 12 and 10 respectively.

Business research questions are often based on ‘real-life’ cases; therefore, action research as research mode is seen as a rather ‘natural’ choice for a research approach, especially when research has some relationship to activities, where new perspectives, [Page 206]developmental work, new practical tools being implemented, or researchers’ view of the business activities are needed. The roles of consultancy and researcher are thus not often very far from each other in business and management sciences, as many of the research questions originate from and have a close relationship to the ‘real life of the business world‘. Therefore, action research might be a good choice for those students who aim to work outside academia and do research work simultaneously. A mild word of caution is put forward in the following, though.

Action research is not by any means an ‘easy’ research approach, especially not in the sense that it will require close cooperation between the researcher and the organization/community/group of people as ‘target’ of research. In order to achieve trust within the organization/community/group in question, you must have confidence in your own knowledge, skills and aim and abilities as a researcher. Especially important are the social skills for understanding, analysing and managing the often very complex social situations in the target organization, and the overall interactive nature of an action research project. A novice researcher might not be able to convince in all these activities. In addition, as a researcher you should have enough knowledge of the ‘target’ organization to tackle the multitude of data and its layered nature that arise in the action research project and, more importantly, the ‘action activities’ that need to take place in the researched organization. Action research can lead, at its best, to a great insight of organizational life and, thus, produce the kind of research materials few researchers have the ability to achieve otherwise. At its worst, action research is a time-consuming and muddled process. If you, as researcher, lose the ability to steer the process clearly, then the project might never end as planned.

Action research is especially situational by nature, as all data are contextually embedded and interpreted. The validation process in action research is a conscious and deliberate enactment of the research cycle. The report writing in action research needs to take all the above-mentioned features into account (Box 13.3).

Often, the process nature of action research requires personal notes, diaries and follow-up of various processes in the research case. All of this material can be used when writing up the report.

One key element in action research is the way the empirical materials are communicated to stakeholders. One way of doing this is to write a summary of the materials analysed which condenses the key characteristics, ranging from the problem statement to the results and to the solutions found. Sharing the results with the researched community/group/organization is part of the empowerment process that is so crucial in action research. The multi-voiced nature of reporting is important, i.e. whose views and expressions are used, whose solution (if not jointly found) was supported, etc. The sharing can take place in different phases of the spiralling research process, and various methods can be used for this purpose. Such methods include the use of focus groups, where persons with similar interests discuss some parts of the findings (see Chapter 12 for more on focus groups). Also, informal meetings and group meetings can be used for this purpose. So-called in-group forums consist of people from

a single-interest or stakeholder group that gather together to discuss particular issues (Stringer, 1999).

Key points of the chapter

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Action research is originally based on practical problem solving and systematizing that experience to research. The various forms of action research all have in common that they are highly interactive research approaches, doing research with people, rather than on people.
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Action research uses a variety of research methods and methodologies, where involvement is suitable. Informed and voluntary consent, mutual trust and high ethical standards are required from the researcher when working closely with the researched community/group/organization.
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Action research has varying connections to consultancy, but there are differences as well. An action research project seldom can be done within a short period of time, but it requires a length of time used for learning, co-learning and mutual reciprocal working before the research project is finalized.
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Action research enables the researched community/group of people/organization to express their views during the research process as collaborators in the project.