Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

REFLECTIONS ON THE PROCESS OF WRITING THIS BOOK 197
in this way by writers in German.) Should the other participants in the
research be named? And above all, how could I justify the creation of a
series of narratives that purported to re-create the experiences of the past
while remaining, inescapably, products of the present?
A naïve belief in telling stories that would represent what truly happened
was not open to me. Writers such as Van Maanen (1988) have
exposed the crafted nature of the ethnographic text; in particular, Geertz
(1988) has uncovered the persuasive power of discourse that is available to
authors in writing about people and cultural contexts. I may not have the
skills of an Evans-Pritchard or a Ruth Benedict, but there is a pressure to do
the best I can with the skills I have, since narrative remains the only way to
give a sense to readers of ‘being there’. But beyond that, the insights that I
drew from my colleague Maggie Maclure’s work into the way that texts
conceal the ‘essential spaces and gaps in the foundations of qualitative
research’ (Maclure 2003: 3), raised my awareness of the ‘weird’ nature of
writing and made me aspire to be open about the writing process.
The creation of a voice and a text would need to be conscious and
crafted – and sufficiently flexible to leave me room to move between
description and theory without artificially separating them. Beyond that,
the peculiar challenges of writing narratives about action research turned
into a kind of hide-and-seek game as I reread my colleague, Ian Stronach’s
article, ‘This space is not yet blank’, in which he describes the process of creating
a text as ‘gingerly picking my way, tensely, across this page, step-bystep,
leaving word prints here and there’ (Stronach 2002: 293). Action
research, as he points out at the beginning of his article, poses particular
challenges for contemporary social scientists because of the assumptions it
carries of uncovering cause and effect and moving forward to what ‘ought’
to be. Indeed, in Stronach’s sense, the nature of the action research narrative
was already inscribed on the blank page before I started: there was a
strong sense for me of being compelled towards creating realist narratives.
The process of writing this book was relatively easy once I had taken
some decisions to answer my own questions. To write a text in line with my
eight methodological principles there would need to be a strong personal
voice, predominantly an ‘I’ rather than a ‘we’, so that I could engage in
reflection and interpretation without presuming to speak for my colleagues.
My aim was to create texts that would enable readers to experience events
from the inside, engaging vicariously in the experience of needing to take
decisions and responding to issues as they arose. My colleagues over the
years would as far as possible be named, partly to give them credit for their
work and partly to embody the text in a larger network of participants and
highlight the importance and diversity of the relationships between people
that gave each project its energy. Naming meant sending chapters to former
colleagues for ‘clearance’ and brought responses which varied from quick
‘permissions’, to expressions of pleasure in being re-immersed in past