Concepts and Transformation - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2001

We offer an epistemological basis for action research, in order to increase the validity, the practical significance, and the transformational potential of social science. We start by outlining some of the paradigmatic issues which underlie action research, arguing for a “turn to action” which will complement the linguistic turn in the social sciences. Four key dimensions of an action science are discussed: the primacy of the practical, the centrality of participation, the requirement for experiential grounding, and the importance of normative, analogical theory. Three broad strategies for action research are suggested: first-person research/practice addresses the ability of a person to foster an inquiring approach to his or her own life; second-person research/practice engages a face-to-face group in collaborative inquiry; third-person research/practice asks how we can establish inquiring communities which reach beyond the immediate group to engage with whole organizations, communities and countries. The article argues that a transformational science needs to integrate first- second- and third-person voices in ways that increase the validity of the knowledge we use in our moment-to-moment living, that increase the effectiveness of our actions in real-time, and that remain open to unexpected transformation when our taken-for-granted assumptions, strategies, and habits are appropriately challenged. Illustrative references to studies that begin to speak to these questions are offered.

This article focuses on the increased uses of concepts of value in discourse about public sector reform. This increased attention to questions of value is partly due to the adoption of values taken from business and economics; value creation, value added and efficiency, and the adoption of analogies from and the language of the market. But it is also due to a growing concern with a lack of attention to the non-tangible or non-economic, political, moral and ethical aspects. Thus, two adversary value sets and both adherents and opponents of new public management reforms unite in a (mis-) conceived agreement over the focus on values. This fundamental value dichotomy may also explain why there seem to be a never-ending struggle to create adequate result indicators and measures of public sector performance. In addition to the complexity of public service provision, one explanation may be that the different values and rationalities of public sector services are in fact incompatible.

There is growing interest in the relevance of psychoanalytic concepts to our understanding of and work with organizations. A non-analyst here describes how some of these concepts have become part of the equipment of a social scientist — notably splitting, transference and counter-transference, the use of the self and transitional dynamics. Conversely, there is a need for psychoanalysts who work with organizations to take on board some elements of organizational social science: the role of evidence, the distinction between the individual and the collective, and the relevance of context.

The understanding of post-Fordist societies as learning economies, in which learning organizations such as learning firms and learning regions play a strategic role, has lately received some criticism. The critique has partly pointed at the structural limits to learning in a capitalist global economy, and partly argued that firms in capitalist societies have always been learning, referring especially to the role of innovation in inter-firm competition. Against the critics, it is argued that the learning region has great potential, both as a theoretical and normative concept and as a practical metaphor for formulating regional policy.