Conducting action research in multi-stakeholder settings―and getting it published

This seminar will address three main questions: (1) What is action research (AR)? (2) How do we conduct multi-stakeholder action research? And (3) How do we make the transition from doing to writing about it? Action Research is carried out, first and foremost, through the establishment of partnerships with multiple stakeholders for the purpose of joint knowledge creation. These partnerships aspire to be democratic, participatory, egalitarian, and mutual so that all stakeholders can make their voices heard, listened to, and taken into account in the process of designing, conducting, and evaluating action research. This process of partnership building in multi-stakeholder not only contributes to social justice, it improves the scope and quality of the knowledge produced and increases the likelihood that this knowledge will have an impact in the real world. However, this process can also be fraught with challenges, including the difficulty of predicting or controlling what knowledge will be produced. Therefore, writing academic articles about action research requires a particular process of reflection and design that draws clear, compelling, and significant knowledge from complex action research processes. In this seminar we will address these issues, providing illustrations from action research projects that involved multi-stakeholder and went from action to publication. Examples are drawn from projects in multi-cultural contexts, including educational institutions and innovative incubators.

Victor J. Friedman is Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and Chairman of the Action Research Center for Social Justice at the Max Stern Yezreel Valley College, Israel.