Call for Papers: Insider Action Research

Posted by on April 29, 2005

[posted from Community Based Participatory Research listserv]

Action Research Call for Papers
Special Issue: Insider Action Research

Guest editors: David Coghlan and Rosalie Holian

We are seeking contributions from people who have undertaken action research in their own organizational systems (organization, association, community, family). By this we mean action research from within systems, conducted by action researchers who are permanent and full members of the organization, rather than those who enter a system temporarily for the sake of conducting research. Doing action research within one?s own system can be seen to involve managing three interlocking dilemmas (Coghlan & Brannick, 2005). Insider action researchers need to build on the closeness they have with the setting, while, at the same time create distance from it in order to see things critically and enable change to happen. They have to hold dual roles; their organizational member role(s) and the action researcher role, and the consequent ambiguities and conflicts between these that can arise. They also have to manage organizational politics and balance the requirements of their future career plans with requirements for the success and quality of their action research.

Our call extends to all forms of organizational system. We seek contributions from across organizational sectors including business, education, healthcare, nursing, social work, voluntary, aid and development, arts, public service, community development, and from any position on a hierarchical ladder. We hope that people will write about perceived successes as well as failures and about their first person experience and their second person work with colleagues. We are interested in reflections during and after insider action research experiences, by those who deliberately chose this path and by those who may have found in retrospect that they had become insider researchers.

If you are willing to contribute to a special issue of Action Research to enable the readership to better understand, appreciate, and deal with the complexities of insider action research, please send your proposals for contributions to David Coghlan at david.coghlan@tcd.ie and Rosalie Holian at rosalie.holian@rmit.edu.au by 1st November 2005. Completed submissions for review will then be due by 30th January 2006; following review, final papers will be due July 2006 for publication in March 2007.

Reference
Coghlan, D. & Brannick, T. (2005). Doing action research in your own organization. 2nd edition. London: Sage.