When Successful Action Research is not Legitimized as Scientific Contribution by the Central Sponsors: How can Morten Levin’s Three Pillars of Action Research Support the Arch of Research Collaboration between Large Public Organizations and Universities?

Stine Dale (), Marte Daae-Qvale Holmemo () and Wenche M. Kjæmpenes ()
Additional contact information
Stine Dale: Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration
Marte Daae-Qvale Holmemo: Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Wenche M. Kjæmpenes: UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Systemic Practice and Action Research, 2024, vol. 37, issue 6, No 2, 613-626

Abstract: Abstract Morten Levin’s work on Action Research (AR) clearly stated that the three pillars participation, action and research was equally important. During his long practice as an AR pioneer, he campaigned for the legitimacy of AR within academia. In this paper we investigate how AR is perceived as sound research within a large and distributed organization. We present a retrospective case study based on a research collaboration between UiT The Artic University of Norway (UiT) and the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Organization (NAV), that fostered an AR project together, ‘Work inclusion, learning and innovation’ (ALIN), but later led to the termination of the collaboration agreement. The ALIN project fulfils all the criteria for being a successful AR project in terms Levin’s action, research and participation criteria. However, external audit and central NAV actors had different expectations of successful institutional research collaboration. Through our case we illustrate several conflict dimensions within the three AR pillars that must be challenged to strengthen the legitimacy of AR. The debate on rigour and relevance should not be limited to academic fields and include various actors and decision makers within large and distributed organizations.

Keywords: Morten Levin; Action research; Legitimized knowledge; Research collaboration; Large and distributed organizations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11213-024-09700-3 Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:syspar:v:37:y:2024:i:6:d:10.1007_s11213-024-09700-3

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/journal/11213

DOI: 10.1007/s11213-024-09700-3

Access Statistics for this article

Systemic Practice and Action Research is currently edited by Robert Flood

More articles in Systemic Practice and Action Research from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().