Action Research A Methodology for Change and Development

52 ACTION RESEARCH
educational organizations, but they were certainly more clearly defined.
Sometimes, too, company culture demonstrated the cruelties of capitalism
and posed huge ethical problems for managers. For example, as HR (or personnel)
managers our course participants were responsible for employing
new staff and maintaining the conditions of service of existing staff. For all
of them this included making all employees aware of the company’s
‘mission statement’, which almost invariably included some variant of: ‘our
employees are our most important asset’. But during the two years in which
I worked with them there was a national movement to increase the efficiency
and ‘value for money’ of organizations and several of our course participants
had to go back to their company’s employees and tell a large
number of them that they were losing their jobs – in one case I remember
that the number of jobs to go amounted to 25 per cent of the company’s
existing workforce.
Theoretical resources for understanding the experience or action research
in business settings
How can I make sense of these very limited experiences of the business
world in order to better understand action research in these settings? For
me the obvious starting point is Kurt Lewin, often credited with inventing
action research, whose realist approach to knowledge led him to search for
reliable theories that would explain human behaviour very much as knowledge
in the natural sciences explains the physical world. Lewin’s Field
Theory, based on empirical research, explained the behaviour of people in
organizations through the formula: B = f(p,e) where ‘B’ stands for behaviour,
‘p’ for personality and ‘e’ for environment (Lewin 1951). In other
words, the behaviour of people in organizations is determined not only by
their personality (as had been previously thought) but also by the environment.
This was an important break-through in management theory because
it meant that employees’ work practices could be improved by changing the
working environment and it was important for managers to take account of
psychological factors in planning formal management structures. The tradition
of action research in business and management goes back to Lewin’s
work and also to the work of Trist, Bion and their colleagues (Trist and
Murray 1993) at the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations in London. To
establish their work formally and publicly, Lewin and Trist founded the
journal Human Relations, the first issue of which appeared in 1950 and contained
two posthumous articles by Lewin.
One of the studies I will focus on in the next section draws on the work
of the Tavistock Institute. However, here I have decided to focus on the
work of Chris Argyris, himself strongly influenced by Lewin, whose publications
span half a century going back to the 1950s. In the second edition
of his book On Organizational Learning (1999), Argyris reprints a large