Back into the Field

In 2005 Shankar Sankaren wrote his “Notes from the Field,” for the Action Research Journal about the sabbatical he took and the many Action Researchers he met during his travels in the US.  One of the over arching themes of Shankar’s reflection was how to increase conversation among Action Researchers spread across the globe.  Could websites be the needed portal for connectivity?  What about conferences and professional networking opportunities?  Or, how about good old fashion books and journals as ways of sharing information and keeping in touch?

These aforementioned methods are great, and combined with technological applications such as skype, blogging, facebook, twitter, and other social media, it appears that keeping in touch and sharing information is easier now than it ever has been.  The combination of communication technology and modern travel make it easy for people to connect in either the virtual or real worlds.

It with these thoughts in mind that I realize how fortunate the Action Research Center, the University of Cincinnati, and the City of Cincinnati are to be hosting Professor Sankaren.  Over the past few weeks I have had pleasure of working in the same space as Shankar, attending meetings together, discussing dissertation ideas, and even arranging a visit for us to volunteer our time at Gorman Heritage Farm —really working in the field.  As an environmentalist, I am often overly critical of long distance travel because of the fuel burned.  However, there is no substitution for “being there,” wherever that is.  Travel and face-to-face meetings, working side-by-side, cultural immersion, and sitting around the same table with others are invaluable experiences. 

John Hemmerle, Shankar Sankaren, Alan Wight
Gorman Heritage Farm - October 18th, 2011

As Peter Reason stated in 2005, “Thank you Shankar for taking the time!”

Alan Wight

Action Research Center

University of Cincinnati

Notes:

Shankar Sankaren. 2005.  Action Research Journal. Notes from the Field: Action Research Conversations.  3 (4), 341 – 350

Peter Reason. 2005.  Action Research Journal.  Editorial.  3 (4), p 339- 340. 

Hilary Bradbury-Huang. Participative death and mourning.

Perhaps more personal a blog than usual. I am convening family members for the funeral-memorial of my brother who died in a tragic accident 44 years ago. I see how the spirit of participation, which arises from the philosophy that we live in a participative universe, has shaped this experience. In holding the funeral memorial we remember my brother (Bill) and we also hold in our hearts all whose tragic deaths marked loved ones left behind. I have been curious to note how many of my close friends have had siblings die young and I wonder if we somehow smell that from one another and the huge toll it takes on a family. And as we understand that about one another, not much needs to be said about it. Of course we wonder how can our parents get over such a thing? And yet death and suffering is a natural part of life. Without it all would be fixed, solid, stolid - another form of frozen death. In my eyes the memorial will be held here in Portland, for my parents it will be in Dublin, for my sister in Boston, for my friend in Tel Aviv ... others will light candles around these many masses and chantings of the heart sutra.  We have coordinated our internationally attunded clocks for "participating together" at 10AM/18.00 GMT on Saturday October 1st. This is a 21st Century memorial. By default I love ritual and by practice I have come to love participative ritual. I read a lovely poem today by Wislawa Szymborska - too long to include but called “On death, without exaggeration.” I will, however, include some lines from Emerson - which evoke for me gentle but intense curiosity about the nature of this participative/recycling universe we get to call home for a while.  Wow aren’t we lucky indeed! It's called "All return again."  Please participate!

“It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire a little from sight and afterwards return again. Nothing is dead; men feign themselves dead, and endure mock funerals and mournful obituaries, and there they stand looking out of the window, sound and well, in some new strange disguise. Jesus is not dead; he is very well alive; nor John, nor Paul, nor Mahomet, nor Aristotle; at times we believe we have seen them all, and could easily tell the names under which they go.”  

Editor's open letter to all ARJ friends and advisers

Dear ARJ friends & thinking partners:

I write 1) to share some highlights of our annual publication report (Hilary can send an e-copy in addition, if you send her an email), 2) to update you on a couple of important items and 3) to invite your input on a next round of strategy design.

1.       The ARJ associate editor board is renewing/adding to itself.  Our process has been to have a nominations committee who speaks with candidates and then brings names forward for formal selection by the associate editor board. Svante Lifvergren MD joined us most recently to lead the healthcare domain. Additionally we will vote to at the next associate editor board meeting to bring two new associate editors for the domains of organizations and education respectively. Though obvious, it bears stating: those actively “driving” the journal define its contribution for at least a few years out.  We welcome any names you’d offer to the nominations committee.

2.      

With regard to the publication report: Clearly the journal is progressing well when measured against conventional performance targets. The trajectory of “numbers/performance measures” in the report support my sense that our ranking will continue to increase, that our citations will increase and that number of downloads will increase. In my view we will likely always be a “niche” journal, but one that clearly has a significant and growing readership, one that is respected. In sum I envisage a dynamic future for our field and for our journal. All this bodes well for “getting the work out there” and for offering tangible credit to scholar colleagues whose promotion is assisted by having journal articles in ranked journals.  

3.       The positive spirit of rejection: Overall we are seeing higher quality work come to us and in higher volume which means we have maintained a relatively high rejection rate (75%).  This is a tricky thing to manage as the spirit of AR is collegial and developmental.  But to the degree possible we offer useful reviews and I have seen enough positive responses from “rejectees” to suggest that our process successfully communicates concern for developing (especially) younger members of the field while also developing quality.

4

.       What’s next for us strategically?

The associate editor board has weighed in on this topic.  The list of actionable ideas includes:

1.       Inviting all “schools” of action research to create a special issue – thereby using the journal to bridge among various schools/approaches,

• 2.       To create a variety of special issues on topics that cut across domains,
• 3.       To create an executive advisory board whose primary role is engage with strategy issues,
• 4.       To have a face to face meeting as a community,
• 5.       Invite a series  of interviews with retiring leaders of our field,
• 6.       Create an alternate publication report around metrics to be determined as part of strategic conversation.

Please add to/comment on this list. What do you want the future of ARJ to be? 

RSVP to Hilary at bradbury@ohsu.edu

Hilary Bradbury-Huang on post conventional mindsets that support action research?

I've been thinking that someone ought to name the degree and strength of post conventional mindsets that influence our field.  That someone may as well be me.  First I better define my terms:

Conventional science is what cures cancer and investigates questions such as “how old is the universe?”  In its more social scientific cast, it asks questions such as …these are questions that leads to understanding what causes what.  Action research addresses an entirely different class of inquiry – e.g., “how do we generate collectively positive outcomes” is a question that may be informed by conventional science but is not going to be answered by it. We might go further and say that the questions of real urgency – how do we act on our understanding of climate change, how to we bring our evolutionarily attuned brains to act wisely in the face of heretofore systemic problems we have never confronted as a species. As much as though we draw on conventional science, there is simply no new fact or research protocol that makes these behaviorally and dynamically complex problems solvable. But the post conventional research mind stops looking to the external world alone to find answers. the post conventional research mind uses the capacity for reflexivity, Janus-like ability to look both at the mind that has created the problem as well as the conditions that form the context for action.  The post conventional mind is one that builds on conventional scientific talents (after all most of us were trained with conventional methods) but transcends those to include a greater repertoire of stakeholder engagement.  ... more anon.

From the editors' desk...Hilary Bradbury-Huang on what's happened this summer...

Back from the summer break and what is top of mind is the newly calculated impact factor for the journal.  The calculation essentially answers the question: “if I publish with ARJ what are the chances that my paper will be cited?” Note that this is a separate question from “will it be read”?  The calculation of  impact factor 0.846 suggests that, on average, each paper we publish is cited almost once.  That may sound rather meager perhaps unless you know that the large journals have an average of 4 citations per paper. Because many have been around a very long time they naturally attract a higher readership. We also looked at how it performs relative to “similar” journals. As you know the journal is highly interdisciplinary and its is hard to know which is the best peer set.  However I was very pleased to find it among the top 100 organization & management journals, set of peer journals that is reasonably meaningful and that I – as an organizational scholar by discipline, know well.  So in a nutshell, not bad for ARJ, by publication standards, very much a “new kid on the block,” who, against all the odds, seeks to offer a platform for counter-conventional inquiry.    As to the easier to determine question of “are we read?”  The answer to this is readily seen on our own website with the download counts for popular articles.  Yes we’re read!  I hear we are very popular with those studying qualitative research because we give adequate space to descriptions of methods and processes. Onward and upward then to the important question of "what's next for us?" Given that the world probably doesn't need a periodical, yet we have a good one getting better, what is important for us in meeting what the world (or the international community of action researchers) does need?  To be continued...

From the Editors' desk. All is change

Hi everyone. I can't wait for my vacation from this blog!! Not that I don't love weekly blogging!! When it goes well there is immediate inspiration to articulate something that has been simmering beneath the conscious surface. And that may well be important.
I find myself thinking about change....”all is change” said Heraclitus and the Buddha said something similar a little beforehand too (it is possible that there was knowledge transfer between these very high cultures of northern India and Southern Greece at around 500 BCE --but I do not wish to digress...)
If “all is change” then what possessed Kurt Lewin to suggest a three phase change model that has been very influential in organizational action research and indeed even in organizational conventional research?! His model went something like: unfreeze the system, make the change, refreeze. It still forms the underlying basis of many change management theories models and strategies for managing change. It still informs much action research.
His premise is that the organization (or any system) is frozen in place - hence we seek to unfreeze things just to begin to make change. More rigorous understanding of reality (a la physics) suggests that all systems are, in fact, extraordinarily dynamic. From the microscopic level up, electrons are whirring around at unimaginable rates, configuring themselves over and over...and in apparently the same way as they just were! Who’d have thunk? Isn't that odd how it all comes together so nicely just the way it was?! Well what if we took scientific insight more seriously as action researchers and allowed ourselves experience that things are, in fact, exactly what they are, namely in profound flux. As such we could imagine how reality can become reconfigured much more easily than we secretly fear. Indeed, a revolution continues to spread across the Middle East, and simultaneously, yes, the Israelis and Palestinians are still at each other’s throats. Both facts are true, change and stubborn stasis. I think about this today as I spent the morning in a faculty meeting and listened to how much all faculty learn from our students about the degree of suffering there is in the workplace. For many our workplaces are simply toxic. This is especially troubling when we consider that the faculty I interact with most spend their time teaching people who work inside healthcare systems. Healthcare systems that make their own employees sick. Hmm.
When I consider that “all is change” then, and I work and teach as an action researcher, I can get in touch with actually how much capacity there is for improving things, after all. “It’s all good” as we say in LA and it could use a lot of improvement. I decide that the insistent reemergence of the status quo comes from fragmentation. There are just too many disconnects among us. However if we can combine our intrinsic capacity for change we'd get, well, change! And that means assuming we can align interests. OK, that is a hard part. But for now at least I have established for myself that acceptance of change as the foundation of how things are means that the spring board from which i invite others to jump with me (toward alignment of interests) is one that is right there -doesn't need to be created - it is how the universe actually is. Einstein is said to have said that the most important question to ask of someone is whether they think the universe is friendly or indifferent. I experience it as friendly. I believe the universe may actually even support non toxic work situations - ones more pleasing (psychologically and socially) to natural systems - we just have to get aligned. Now that’s where action research comes in!

Hilary Bradbury-Huang,
Editor ARJ
Portlandia, USA.

From the Editors' desk: Welcome Svante Lifvergren to the Associate Editor board at ARJ

I am pleased to announce that Svante Lifvergren, MD., who leads the Centre for Healthcare Improvement (CHI), Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg in Sweden has agreed to join us at ARJ. Svante will be part of the ARJ journal's associate editor board. He will lead the growing healthcare domain. I speak for all of my colleagues on the AE board -- Drs. Mary Brydon-Miller, Victor Friedman, Patricia Gaya Wicks, Davydd Greenwood, Meghna Guhathakurta, Marianne Kristiansen and Ernie Stringer-- in offering welcome to Svante.
Svante is both a scholar and practitioner. In leading CHI, he says the main idea behind the Center is to enhance quality improvement work in healthcare from a patient point of view, by facilitating learning about improvement across boundaries. In this way the action is toward a creative rather than reactive approach to health and wellbeing. Healthcare PAR is therefore very much alive and thriving in this arena. A large measure of the work is also educational - with Masters level courses offered to Healthcare leaders. Svante’s background as a physician and hospital administrator allows him bring practice and scholarship together. The education is designed to help these specialists think beyond technical excellence and toward greater systems alignment. That this all happening with strong government support in Sweden, one of the world's most advanced countries in terms of quality of life, women's activity in society and with little healthcare disparity across social and ethnic lines. Doesn’t that make us silently wonder if it's even relevant to other countries whose deep struggles with healthcare are only increasing? In fact to write of there being so little healthcare disparity across class and ethnicities makes me wonder if Sweden is somehow in a parallel universe! Nonetheless there too people who are living so long and using costly therapies pose problems. Problems like these have not really been addressed by healthcare and it seems that a more behavioral, humanistic approach is well placed to address resource allocation in an ethical way –action researchers working with health care consumers to acknowledge our human fear of death and even greater fear of incapacitation in old, old age. What does the future portend for all of us?! But I digress – even as I encourage action researchers to consider study designs on these complex issues…”dying well, dying participatively,” anyone? Besides where best to pose the difficult questions than in places that resource intelligent systems approaches to change.
Like all good action researchers Svante takes a networking approach to learning among hospital leaders across nations and continents. This is important given our commitment to being in dialogue with our colleagues in the developing world. We are lucky to have Svante join us. We also look forward to some more health focused special issues in the future. Welcome Svante.