Concepts and Transformation - Volume 9, Issue 2, 2004

One of the central ideas of both Critical Theory social theory and of pragmatist theories of knowledge is that epistemic and normative claims are embedded in some practical context. This “practical turn” of epistemology is especially relevant to the social sciences, whose main practical contribution, according to pragmatism, is to supply methods for identifying and solving problems. The problem of realizing the democratic ideal under modern social conditions is not only an instance of pragmatist inspired social science, pragmatists would also argue that it is the political context for practical inquiry today, now all the more pressing with the political problems of globalization. Despite weaknesses in the pragmatist idea of social science as the reflexive practical knowledge of praxis, a pragmatic interpretation of critical social inquiry is the best way to develop such practical knowledge in a distinctly critical or democratic manner. That is, the accent shifts from the epistemic superiority of the social scientist as expert to something based on the wider social distribution of relevant practical knowledge; the missing term for such a practical synthesis is what I call “multiperspectival theory.” As an example of this sort of practical inquiry, I discuss democratic experiments involving “minipublics” and argue that they can help us think about democracy in new, transnational contexts.

All concepts applied in social research have two sources of meaning: other words and practical experience. Making knowledge (more) actionable implies increasing the emphasis on the practical. This increase, however, is no simple process to be carried through as a turnaround operation. Rather, the shift demands a process consisting of several steps, ranging from establishing dialogic relationships with other people to the development of “regions of meaning” where theory and practice can interact in new ways. The article traces and discusses one such process of development, drawing on experience over two decades from action research in Scandinavian working life.

This article argues that the question of what actionable knowledge is, can hardly be answered appropriately either by solely theoretical argumentation or by solely practical demonstration. It is in the very interplay between theory and practice that knowledge can prove to be actionable. Thus it becomes crucial to come to an adequate theoretical understanding of this interplay on the basis of practical experiences. This article, however, does not argue in favour of any particular theoretical model as the only adequate interpretation of this interplay. Rather, the main argument is that experiences from Scandinavian action research programs over the last decades indicates that it is necessary to deconstruct the conventional concepts of general knowledge to be able to construct actionable knowledge. The briefly article presents some of the main steps in this development, and thereby some new perspectives on the main features of actionable knowledge. On this basis, the final part of the article presents some arguments why a linguistic turn in action research and in management and organisation studies may pave the way for a hitherto greatly underexploited resource for creating actionable knowledge: the personal experience of the researchers.

As living, embodied beings, communication begins in, and continues with, our living, spontaneous, expressive-responsive (gestural), bodily activities that occur in the meetings between ourselves and the others and othenesses around us. It is by our 1st-person expressions that we influence the actions of others — our tellings are much more important than our reportings . Thus, as I see it, abstract and general theories are of little help to us in the unique living of our unique lives together, either as ordinary people, as professional practitioners, or as action researchers. On the other hand, however, the specific words of others, uttered as ‘reminders’ at a timely moments within an ongoing practice, drawing out attention to unnoticed features of the practice, can be a crucial influence in developing and refining it further. In this paper I distinguish between two kinds of speech/writing: ‘withness (dialogic)’ -talk and ‘aboutness (monologic)’ -talk . Crucial in this distinction is our spontaneous, expressive, living, bodily responsiveness. While monological aboutness-talk is unresponsive to the activities of the others around us, dialogical withness-talk is not. In being spontaneously responsive both to the expressions of others, as well as our own, as I show in the paper, it engenders in us both unique anticipations as to what-next might happen along with, so to speak, ‘action-guiding advisories’ as to what-next we might do — a feature that is of central relevance for action research.