By integrating ‘learning by doing’ with deep reflection, action research has always held the promise of an embedded learning process that can simultaneously inform and create change. The approach has been developed and refined over decades so that it is now able to comprehensively answer challenges about its robustness, rigour and quality (see Chapter Eight), but I will argue it has also been limited by scale, by a linear model of change and by an over-reliance on consensual and dialogic processes which, although important, have neglected the impact of power. This book offers a vision of action research that I hope is able to meet those challenges.

I do not propose to trace the history of action research in this chapter as this has been done in numerous texts (see, for example, Greenwood and Levin; 1998; Reason and Bradbury, 2001). Rather, I intend to explain what I mean by action research, to map some of the arguments for shifting beyond either an ‘individual’ or ‘small group’ focus, and to signal how I and colleagues in SOLAR have been developing it as a process for supporting large-scale social and organisational change.

What is action research?

Action research is not a methodology. It is an approach to inquiry that supports many methods in the service of sense making through experimental action. It combines inquiry with action as a means of stimulating and supporting change and as a way of assessing the impact of that change. By inquiry I refer to a process of insight generation about issues of importance. This process combines intellectual analysis with experiential knowing, and works with many forms of evidence. The evidence can range from stories, to statistical data, to qualitative questionnaires, images and so on. These are made sense of within an action research hub. The process provides a picture of what is really happening by unravelling the consequences of action, which in turn provides a foundation for new action.