Concepts and Transformation - Volume 7, Issue 2, 2002

This article examines how and why the academically-based social sciences, both pure and applied, have lost their relevance to practical human affairs (praxis) and links this discussion to the reasons why action research is a marginal activity in the academic and policy worlds. It also contains a harsh critique of action research practice focused on action researchers’ combined sense of moral superiority over conventional researchers and general complacency about fundamental issues of theory, method, and validity. The central argument is that “doing good” is not the same as “doing good social research” and that we action researchers need to hold ourselves accountable to higher standards, not only to compete with conventional social research but for the benefit of the non-academic stakeholders in action research projects.

This article presents an empirically based argument for what I have labeled ‘discourse democracy at work’. The idea of discourse democracy at work is launched to supplement the various representative models of democracy we find in European working life. Starting with a brief elaboration of the concept of public sphere, the article presents a number of reasons why all parties in working life can benefit from applying some kind of internal public spheres within private enterprises. The experiences gained over 20 years with an agreement between the labor market parties in Norway, on enterprise development based on broad participation from the employees, forms the basis for a more detailed presentation of how discourse democracy at work may be put into practice. The concluding section presents some principal arguments as to why a strategy for discourse democracy is particularly apt today — in a working life characterized by trends like increasing knowledge industries, individualism on the personal level and globalization on the societal level.

Playful action — undirected, interactive, boundary-transgressing and scenic — provides creative potential for the process of technological development. This thesis is developed with reference to John Dewey. In the course of the argument experience is assigned an indispensable position as a method of gaining knowledge. The argument presented grants an innovative status to experience-based, playful action, opposed to the hegemony of the technical-economical logic, which stresses exactness, unambiguity and measurability. The hegemony of the technical-economical logic in the Western industrialized countries is responsible for the discreditation of playful action. But the price to be paid is to go without the innovative impulses which are essential elements of playful action.

Projects initiated or supported by the regional branch of the Dutch FNV trade union confederation have introduced the concept of using “regional policy space”. Moreover, in the early 1990s these projects seemed able to halt the erosion of the confederation’s power. This article describes and analyses the “FNV industribution project”, focusing on the physical part of Value Added Logistics (VAL), aiming to cover this “white spot” with a social infrastructure. After five years of preparation, the project was launched in 1996. As four FNV unions were involved, FNV regional officers logically took the co-ordination role. This role was phased out with the amalgamation of these unions in 1998, while the new, unified union abolished their regional structures: the role of FNV officers as labour market specialists did not supply enough added value. An evaluation conducted in mid-2000 showed that the basis for a social infrastructure was laid, and that the union position was strengthened in two out of the four regions involved. Promising new ways of union working were developed, but the related learning effects were rather limited to individual regional officers. The virtual absence of organisational learning can be partly attributed to factors like the need for project management to concentrate on (external) funding, and partly to the rapid disappearance of FNV regional officers from the project.