essential-guide-to-qualitative-in-organizational-research

352 –––––––––– QUALITATIVE METHODS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES ––––––––––––––––––the capacity for action (Bradbury, 2003) The reasons for drawing a boundary around AR/RAwill be become clearer when we look at how these methods came about.A BIT OF HISTORY ––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––Most social scientists trace the origin of Action Research to the period of the Second World Warand its aftermath (Cunningham, 1993). Kurt Lewin and his colleagues at the Center for GroupDynamics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are usually associated with the early useof the term Action Research. The Tavistock Institute in London was equally interested in usingsocial science to facilitate action and introduce change. In America as well as in Britain, the needwas to understand new problems and then introduce the necessary change potential. In Britainthere was the need to find new methods to select senior officers and rehabilitate prisoners of war.Social psychiatrists, psychologists and anthropologists were encouraged to combine their skills todeal with these issues and in this way ‘a new action-oriented philosophy of relating psychiatryand the social sciences to society had become a reality in practice’. This was described as ‘the socialengagement of social science’ (Trist and Murray, 1990: 1–34). Action was based on the discoveryof new ways of engaging with groups in a variety of circumstances. This applied to group-basedselection procedures that were successful during the Second World War and consequently carriedover to the selection of senior civil servants (Murray, 1990: 45–67). Different experiences led tothe discovery of group methods that were used to design therapeutic communities (Bridger, 1990:68–87) and the re-settlement of prisoners of war (Curle, 1947: 42–68).In the USA, even before Pearl Harbor precipitated America into the war, there was a needto send meat and butter to the European allies and this could be facilitated by persuadinghousewives to substitute beef hearts, sweetbreads and kidneys for conventional cuts of meat,and margarine for butter. There was no clear evidence for the superiority of different changemethods like dialogue or lecture over more participatory methods of facilitating action. Hence,Kurt Lewin and colleagues embarked on a series of experiments to discover the most effectiveway of changing the behaviour of critical gatekeepers, in this case housewives, who make foodpurchasing decisions. The same content of argument and the same amount of time wasdevoted to matched groups who listened to lectures or took part in participative groupdiscussions that ended with a request to indicate their decision by raising or not raising theirhand. In a range of well-documented examples the group-decision method was about threetimes more effective in producing changes in purchasing behaviour (Lewin, 1947, 1953).These early classical studies provide perfect examples of what I have called Research Action(RA). The initial purpose of the research was discovery. Action followed once reasonablyadequate knowledge had become available. During the last decade many researchers haveshifted their emphasis from knowledge acquisition towards the achievement of change and thislegitimates the term Action Research or Participative Action Research 3 (see, for instance,Whyte, 1991). However, as I argued earlier, in social science there remain many issues thatrequire extensive clarification, experience and knowledge before action can be safelyrecommended. This was clearly the position taken by Lewin and colleagues and the argumentremains valid today and justifies the term Research Action. 4 Gustavsen (1998) is now keento distance himself from the classical methodology of Lewin, in part because earlyScandinavian fieldwork did not diffuse very successfully. There is no doubt that he is correctto draw attention to this problem and experiment with more intensive diffusion methods such