Concepts and Transformation - Volume 2, Issue 2, 1997

Charles Peirce's 'retroduction' is a form of hypothesis generation that takes its place alongside deduction and induction as forms of enquiry and logical inference. It is the only one of the three that can generate innovation and advance knowledge. It is fundamentally tied to open systems theory and the world hypothesis of contextualism. In particular, retroduction is founded in ecological learning, our ability to directly extract meaningful knowledge about our world. Ecological learning and retroduction define the logic of discovery. This ability arises from adaptation through a process of coevolution rather than natural selection. The implication of this adaptation is that no firm barriers can be drawn between common sense and scholarly knowledge, nor between researcher and researched when the researched are human systems. There are three choices of relationship between action researchers and their researched human systems, only one of which - collaboration - respects the intrinsic nature of the people involved.

This paper reflects on ways AR might support a transformation process in universities and in their relationship to the rest of society. As a point of departure, universities inherited from the 19th century Humboldtian university the credo of 'researching and teaching any important subject' and creating new knowledge through the freedom of thought. They became a state within the state. Universities came to try to nonopolize the knowledge production system while fighting the battle for freedom of thought and expression in academia. They have not, however, participated in the struggle to create knowledge based on and useful to groups in society other than powerful academic, political, and business elites.Now universities face new challenges. The existing modus operandi is unlikely to survive for much longer because the users of knowledge and those who pay to keep universities open, question the relevance of university-created knowledge. This challenge arises from two very different social groups. Businesses are creating their own schools of advanced study and many ordinary people are disenchanted with university knowledge that does not relate to their own life world. This problem is particularly acute in the social sciences, since people have social knowledge of their own. Many pecple realize that social science produces knowledge about the everyday world that is incomprehensible or irrelevant to ordinary people.We propose taking a different view of universities, conceptualizing them as members of many different knowledge supply chains, not as autopoietic systems. The ultimate challenge in a specific knowledge supply chain is to gain societal legitimacy for the knowledge production process and to supply valued knowledge for the users. Pursuing this approach forces a reinvestigation of the rigor/relevance argument. We argue that universities should seek legitimacy in the external world through integrating themselves in many and diverse knowledge supply chains and that this effort will simultaneously improve the quality of knowledge produced by the universities. We offer an Action Research strategy to achieve this integration by linking knowledge users into the research process and integrating the researchers into the knowledge production systems and activities of the users beyond the academy.

This paper presents the action and intellectual agenda for transdisciplinary research at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. The research aims at integrating technological and social science knowledge in a participative effort in enterprise development. It is argued that there are clear similarities between the epistemological foundation of engineering and action research oriented social science. Emphasis is also placed on how the cooperation within the research team and the participative approach to enterprise developments shapes the type of knowledge that is produced.

During its (very brief) history, psychosociology has experienced many changes, affecting its methods as well as its goals. It has nevertheless held a place apart among the other social sciences. Its specificity rests not so much on the objects — groups, institutions, organizations — that it has chosen to study, as on the manner according to which they have been approached, linking field and theoretical work. As a result, a different view of these objects has evolved, if not their dissolution as such. Social organizations, in particular, have appeared as complex constructs defying any general definition and, thereby, any general theory. In return, they have been revealed as the locus of events, or processes, through which history, both individual and social, is in the making.