Action Research as Process-Based Knowing

Abstract

Action research has long been treated as a marginal methodology in the social sciences, largely owing to its lack of fit with modern assumptions about the nature of scientific research. These assumptions, however, are specific to an empiricist paradigm. My aim in the present offering is to lay out the logic of an alternative paradigm, a process-based paradigm of knowledge, adequate to the practices of action research and its relatives. This logic touches on issues of pragmatic potential, ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Such a paradigm legitimates an enormously important form of knowledge, otherwise obscured by empiricist hegemony, and opens a generative link between action research and a vast array of inquiry and practice in the social sciences. I shall also propose that the forms of research favored by a process paradigm – and most fully realized in action research – are arguably more significant in their potentials than those available within empiricist tradition. In the contemporary context of rapid change and global peril, the potential contribution of such research is unparalleled.

Affiliated Institutions

• Swarthmore College US

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