Collaborative Inquiry as Social Construction
Learning for a Complex World: Facilitating Collaborative Inquiry Conference
University of Surrey
25-27 June 2007
Dr Peter Critten
MiddlesexUniversityBusinessSchool
The Burroughs
London NW4 4BT
Tel 020 8411 5858
Email:
Collaborative Inquiry as Social Construction
The central argument of this paper is that by encouraging managers to engage in collaborative/co-operative inquiry and reflect on their own practice in collaboration with others they have the potential of re-constructing the organisation in the context of which their investigation is grounded. Reference is made to trends in the way co-operative inquiry has developed and links are made with a social constructive view of organisation change and development in the context of complexity theory.. Finally, examples are given of the work of a group of managers from one organisation whose collaborative inquiry has the potential of informing organisational practice and creating ‘new’ organisational relationships
Collaborative/ Co-operative Inquiry
In Co-operative Inquiry ‘the inquirers [are] moving to and fro between reflection and experience so that these poles arein repeated interplay with each other (Heron 1988 p44) Since the 1980s John Heron and Peter Reason have done much to move the Action Research Agenda beyond Lewin’s original concept (Lewin 1946) of action research as a continuous process of acting, reflection on the action and then acting again in the light of what you have found. While it is all of these things, which could be seen as a‘basic problem-solving procedure’ (McNiff, Lomax & Whitehead 2003), later developments (including Heron and Reason) have focused more on the personal and social implications of collectively reflecting on your practice. This is the focus I too want to take and illustrate , particularly in relation to how this process can lead to a social restructuring of the participants’ world
Perhaps the key development is that in Co-operative Inquiry:
‘..all those involved in the research are both co-researchers , whose thinking and decision making contribute to generating ideas, designing and managing the project, and drawing conclusions from the experience , and also co-subjects, participating in the activity being researched; (Reason 1994 :326)
In introducing my students to Action Research they have difficulty in separating themselves from the traditional notion of the researcher being ‘separate’ from those they are seeking to ‘research on’. The idea of the whole group, including themselves having an equal role as co-researchers is often an alien concept. And when we come to the approach of Whitehead and Mcniff whereby they are encouraged to put their own values and beliefs at the centre of their research , see later. (Whitehead and McNiff 2006) for many this is a bridge too far. But, those who can sustain their position ‘at the edge of chaos’ , as we shall see in next section, the results can be literally transformative.
A good example of co-operative inquiry at work I think can be found in a study carried out by Helen Traylen as part of her doctorate programme. (Traylen 1994). She gives a vivid account of the approach she used in exploring with a group of health visitors the nature of stress at work. Prior to deciding to take a ‘co-operative’ inquiry approach she had carried out individual interviews with the health visitors ; but she became ‘increasingly unhappy with my research approach’ :
‘As I became more skilled in conducting the interviews I began to pay more attention to the interview process and to the way I was reacting. I began to feel very confused and uncertain about what I was trying to do and realised how difficult it was to probe into the nature of the relationship between the health visitor and her client. The more I talked to health visitors the more I came to realise that what I was trying to understand was extremely complex. The health visitors themselves were not very articulate in describing their relationships with clients ‘ (Traylen 1994:59)
A key skill in cooperative inquiry which she identifies above is the researcher’s capacity to pay attention to their own practice both individually and collectively. See Mason 2003 for an excellent exploration of ‘paying attention ‘ to practice as a central process in teachers’ accounts of researching their own practice . Also see Barber (2006) . Traylen draws attention to the cyclical nature of co-operative inquiry and goes on to identify four phases in her own work:
Phase 1 : Identification of the issues to be explored
Phase 2Convergent cycles of inquiry in action
Phase 3Engaging in Chaos
Phase 4Communicating the research
I want to focus on Phase 3 which I suspect is a stage most of us engaged with this kind of research have experienced. Examples cited in Section 2 will explore this further. In fact one doesn’t want to descend into ‘chaos’, as Traylen explains, but ‘hold the anxiety at the edge of chaos’ (Stacey 2001). As soon as we step away from the safe boundaries of rational observation and are prepared to ‘engage’ with our ‘co-researchers’ the process inevitably unearths ‘undiscussables’ where Traylen suggests there are three options:
Option 1Ignore the undiscussables and revert back to ‘comfortable’ behaviour (Old Order)
Option 2Let the undiscussables take over to the extent that the whole group becomes dysfunctional (Chaos)
Option 3‘Hold the anxiety’ and encourage group to reflect on what is happening to enable them to work towards a ‘new order’
I want to quote in full an incident Traylen describes as an example of what it is like to ‘hold the anxiety’ at the edge of chaos and, as a consequence, the liberating movement towards a new order
‘Just when we were feeling so confident the group was thrown into confusion, uncertainty and depression. In a way we had been deceiving ourselves that we were doing all right: this discussion stopped us in our tracks. Everyone knew intuitively the group had to address this more fundamental issue about our practice. We were swamped by the enormity of the task and scared about whether we would be able to make sense of it all….. All I could hang on to at this stage was the thought that if the group could hold this chaos for long enough perhaps something would emerge. We agreed to do some thinking and writing before we next met.
At the second reflection session we spent quite a lot of time dealing with how badly we felt after the last session, dealing with feelings about adequacy, competence and articulation. Despite these feelings each of the group had done some thinking or wiring as agreed…..
……after lengthy discussion the group experienced a breakthrough. We had struggled with this idea about health and we asked ourselves: “What does this mean to the families we visit?”. Gradually we began to talk about the idea of health as being a sense of “well being”. The role of the health visitor was to help families maintain an equilibrium and quality of life which attributed to this sense of well being….
……A new cycle of research began to be formulated around the idea of how we could communicate this health visitors’ aim of “well being” (Traylen 1994: 76-77)
I am sure many of us can identify with this kind of situation which is reminiscent of stages described by Scott Peck as necessary to the creation of a ‘community’ which, by necessity has got to beyond the ‘politeness’ of reinforcing the norms to what he described as a stage of confusion and then ‘silence’ from which a new community could be created. (Peck 1988). The ‘creation’ of a new order brings us to ‘social construction’
The Social Construction of Organisations
In linking ‘social construction’ with ‘organisations’ I have to declare the perspective I am coming from which is not from the disciplines of the social sciences and sociology in which the concept originated (Berger & Luckermann; Weick 1979; Gergen 1982). My background has been in Human Resource Development and Organisation Change and Development. For many years my guide in attempting to teach organisation theory and development has been Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organisation (Morgan1986). What distinguishes this book from others on organisation and management theory, Morgan suggests is that
‘Most of these offer a specific theory for understanding and managing organizations or try to develop an integrated framework that highlights certain dimensions over others. They reduce our understanding of organization to a particular way of seeing. My approach, on the other hand, was to suggest that, because any particular way of seeing is limited (including the one being advocated!), the challenge is to become skilled in the “art of seeing”, in the art of “understanding”, in the art of “interpreting” and “reading” the situations we face,’ (Morgan 1993 : 281)
In the book Morgan poses a series of ‘What if’ questions which encourage the reader to ‘think’ about the organisation – any organisation as machines, as brains, as cultures, as political systems, psychic prisons, flux and transformation, instruments of domination. Just as my students were confused at having to ‘think’ about research as a way of reflecting on one’s practice and that of colleagues in order to improve it , they have been equally challenged when asked to discount organisations as having any ‘objective’ features other than being constructed according to how we see/think about it. This then holds out the possibility if we can change the way we think about organisations we can change the organisation
This is the theme that Patricia Shaw explores in challenging the concept that an organization has an existence separate from our own activity, even though we are uneasily aware that it is not so’ (Shaw 2002) Through the medium of ‘conversations’ she proposes a way in which individuals can ‘reshape’ their organisation. But
‘I won’t be writing about conversations that take place “in” an organization, but about conversing as organizing. I will be describing and illustrating conversation as a process of communicative interaction which has the intrinsic capacity to pattern itself. No single individual or group has control over the forms that emerge, yet between us we are continuously shaping and being shaped by those forms from within the flow of our responsive relating’ (Shaw 2002: 11)
Patricia Shaw was a founder member of Ralph Stacey’s ‘Complexity and Management Centre’ at the University of Hertfordshire and her approach has been very much influenced by arguments around organisations as complex adaptive systems. I too have been influenced by complexity theory which in the field of knowledge management has had a big influence on how our perception of knowledge has changed from the mainstream view of knowledge which Stacey sums up as follows:
‘the view is that knowledge must be extracted from individuals and preserved for the organization in the form of practices, routines and codes of one kind or another in which organizational knowledge is said to be stored. (Stacey 2001: 42)
The underpinning assumption is that knowledge exists somewhere out there as a ‘thing’ to be captured, what McElroy calls ‘the supply side of Knowledge Management’ (McElroy 2003) . But with a growing awareness of the complexity of organisations (Stacey 2001) in the last few years there has been a shift towards a new generation of knowledge management in which ‘..we grow beyond managing knowledge as a thing to also managing knowledge as a flow. To do this we will need to focus more on context and narrative, than on content’ (Snowden 2002)
The ‘social constructionist’ view I am advocating in this paper (sense making by individuals and sharing of stories), I suggest, has taken over from the Cartesian view of knowledge locked in individuals’ heads . In this world ‘knowledge is embedded in the ordinary everyday conversations between people’ (Stacey 2001:36). In such a context ‘ knowledge is not an ‘”it” but a process of action ‘ which, picking up where Habermas left off (Habermas 1987), Stacey calls ‘communicative interaction’
Picking up the same theme Wenger’s promotion of ‘communities of practice’ also promotes the idea of “knowing” as a matter of … action, engagement in the real world’ (Wenger 1998). Out of the active participation and engagement with others, he suggests, we arrive at our identity through a process of ‘negotiated meaning’. Savage puts forward a similar notion in his view of ‘work as dialogue’ (Savage 1996).
In the Appendix is a model I constructed some years back to try and make sense of how change takes place in organisations if we take a complexity and social constructionist view of the world. (Critten 2006 ) I tried to depict an organization as subject to change in two dimensions – top/ down and bottom/up ; outside/in and Inside/out. The right hand side of the model could be described as mainly in what Stacey calls ‘the legitimate zone’ responding to outside forces to shape its strategy and creating norms and procedures to ensure that top-down decisions are delivered from the bottom/up. The left hand side is more in what Stacey describes as the ‘shadow’ zone (See Appendix). In contrast to the ‘strategic view’ of organisations as shaped by ‘outside/in’ forces in this zone the organisation becomes the ‘formative’ creation of people from bottom/up – what I call the inside/out view of organizations.
It is in this zone where I suggest the kind of research described above can be carried out which in turn can have an impact to ‘transform’ the ‘legitimate’ zone of the organisation. In the next section I illustrate how the creation and validation of workbased learning programmes has given us the opportunity to bring about a ‘social reconstruction’ of one particular organisation
How Practice can become Theory
Over the past two years MiddlesexUniversity BusinessSchool has introduced two post-graduate work based learning programmes. One is an MA in Leadership and Management Practice and the other a Doctorate in Professional Practice (DProf). The MA grew out of an action learning leadership programme we accredited run by an independent provider for a large Financial Services Company. We agreed that managers on this programme could use their credits towards an MA at the University on condition that the students attended a module on research methods and completed a final project/ dissertation. They have all now submitted their final project.
The DProf follows the same approach that has been pioneered by the National Centre for Work Based Learning Partnership at the University. Participants are professionals who are seeking to draw on their experience as professional practitioners to work on a project the outcome of which can be seen to make a difference to their profession/ organisation. Like the MA the DProf depends on students collecting academic credits for each stage of the programme. Students begin with a review of their past learning and identification of key learning which can contribute to their final project for which they can get additional credits. They then have to complete a research and planning module and submit their plan for approval before embarking on the final project.
Common to both programmes is a research methodology based around action research and , in particular, action research as living theory (Whitehead and McNiff 2006). In action research, as compared with traditional positivist research, ‘Practitioners investigate their own practice, observe, describe and explain what they are doing in company with one another and produce their own explanations for what they are doing and why they are doing it’ (Whitehead & McNiff 2006: 13) Action research usually is about a group of people inquiring into their practice together in order to improve it. The group own the data they produce and the theory that underpins it. This is in contrast to social science research where ‘the theory is generated and owned by the researcher and is about other people’ Whitehead & McNiff 2006: 12)
In arriving at the notion of ‘Living Theory’ Whitehead and McNiff examine the nature of theory:
‘In broad terms it is possible to say that when you claim that you have a theory you are making a claim to knowledge…Knowledge claims by definition contain explanations because when you say “This is the way things are” you are also implying that you can explain why things are the way they are’ Whitehead & McNiff 2006: 29)
The authors maintain that
‘practice was a form of real life theorizing. As we practise we observe what we do and reflect upon it. We make sense of what we are doing through researching it. We gather data and generate evidence to support our claims that we know what we are doing and why we are doing it (our theories of practice) and we test these knowledge claims for their validity through the critical feedback of others. These theories are our living theories’ Whitehead & McNiff 2006: 32)
Action research as living theory has mainly been undertaken by teachers. A useful source about the theory and the practice is Jack Whitehead’s own website: . We have introduced this methodology to business people because we believe the approach is at the very heart of leadership in an increasingly complex world. It requires practitioners to be upfront about ‘the standards by which we make judgements on our own practice so that we can say “we know what we are doing and we can explain why we are doing it”’ And most important of all, the concept of living theory provides a platform for articulating what is ‘new’ in our knowing:
‘The theories are located within and generated from within the practice and influence the development of new practices which in turn act as the grounds for the development of new theory and new practices. While the narratives you read are narratives of practice they are also narratives of theorizing, that is, what the person has come to know and how they are thinking differently about their work and themselves’ (Whitehead and McNiff 2006:119-120