Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

AGENCY, CHANGE AND THE GENERATION OF ACTIONABLE KNOWLEDGE 15
empower the individual self and entitling the teachers’ publications in the
Pupil Autonomy in Learning with Microcomputers (PALM) project,
(1988–90) the Teachers’ Voices series (see Chapter 3). The theories of action
embedded in both the emancipatory action research of Carr and Kemmis
(1983) and the practical science of Elliott (1993) were also primarily based
on an assumption of a unitary self, although both theories stressed the
importance of individual selves working in groups and engaging in what
Habermas calls ‘communicative action’.
In more recent years I have come to see that conceptualizing the self as
socially constructed and multiple rather than unitary provides many useful
insights into the nature of action in action research. It enables new ways of
understanding agency, which I am defining here as the capability of a self
to take actions that will have an impact on a social situation. Moving to this
new conceptualization of the self was a revelatory process in my learning. I
had early on been alerted to the patterned nature of human behaviour
through a simple method of interpreting data transcripts called ‘pattern
analysis’ (Ireland and Russell 1978). These patterns are very easily observable
in any social situation involving human interaction (Garfinkel 1984).
It quickly became clear to me that much human behaviour is strongly routinized
and that this has the enormous advantage that we can function
effectively in situations that make multiple demands on us (for example, as
a manager or a teacher) by off-loading a large proportion of our behaviour
to automatic actions and utterances. It also has disadvantages. At a trivial
level, for example, we may find ourselves driving somewhere we go everyday
when we actually intended to go somewhere quite different. At a more
fundamental level the routines established in professional practice – what
we say, how we stand, our attitudes to children, to their parents, to colleagues
and how we speak to them – are likely to be largely unconscious
and may actually be counter-productive to our espoused intentions (Argyris
and Schon 1974). Freud’s tripartite model of the self is useful in exploring
how these routine behaviours are established: the ‘ego’ or conscious self
co-exists with the ‘super-ego’, which constantly invokes the voice of
authority to regulate and control the ‘ego’, and the ‘id’ or sub-conscious,
which incorporates the basic drives of survival towards food, sex and selfprotection
and, oblivious to the super-ego, constitutes an uncontrollable
force that constantly subverts the intentions of the ego (Freud 1986). Using
this model of the self, some of our routine behaviours can be seen as
originating in the ‘unconscious’ and therefore signifying the duality of our
purposes in a kind of continual struggle between the civilized and subconscious,
uncontrollable elements of our self, mutually constrained by the
intrusive and controlling authority of the super-ego. In Freudian analysis,
action is always motivated by the self, but the motivation may originate in
the id and be largely hidden from, and unacknowledged by, the ego.