Teams and action research: What do we know?

I’m sharing here a question that I received over email as I suspect it is relevant to many of us doing action research. Please add your thoughts too.

Q: Have you ever come across an article that outlines the use of advisory teams comprised of people within an organization or community who could help to move any recommendations stemming from a research project forward?
In the work our school does with MA students for their capstone projects and theses, we typically recommend that students create an action team (or inquiry advisory team). I am currently seeking to better ground this practice in the AR/CBR/CAR/PR literature. I have a number of articles on hand that speak to researchers’ use of such an advisory team, but nothing that describes the roles/responsibilities/functions that would be helpful for a student to understand the overarching purpose.
I’m wondering whether you have come across any resources that speak specifically to the purpose and function of this kind of an advisory team.

A: This is a tricky one to answer, with brevity. I agree that all action research is, to put it simply, a team effort. The language of team is probably more familiar and comfortable to us in the management and organization world than perhaps in other domains. As an organization studies/management “expert” myself, I have always drawn on team literature* to inform my work both as a facilitator/leader/participant with AR and when teaching students about AR. Typically I use the language of stakeholders and the practice of doing a stakeholder diagnosis etc. I believe these processes are rather similar to those associated with teaming–though I have never seen an article that says so.

Another tricky part of all this is how much our team practices are to be codified. E.g., How much is my shaping and leading of teams the same as yours etc…and how careful do we need to be about similarity and difference. More generally where does codification fit in to this art/science process we call AR?
Codification has its place. I’ll bet that the CBPR world – because of their close association to healthcare – is likely the most codified of the practices around stakeholder teams.

Your question had me look at the newest edition of The Handbook of AR and I see “team” is mentioned only twice in the index. Yet as editor I can safely say that as many as half the practice & skills chapters are discussing things that you and I would see as having the elements of “teamwork.” But clearly we all use different language depending on our disciplinary base.

To offer practical suggestions here would be to share that I always have my students be clear on their own process with stakeholders (students write a research design proposal which includes a lot of detail, generated with stakeholders, about how theuy plan to work together – of course usually life happen and that is different from the plan!). The conversations behind such plans are an opportunity to be informed by the best team literature. But clearly it’s time for someone to write a good article on teams and action research. (Might that person be you ????

PS The team literature is voluminous. For the sake of simplicity, I find I like two books by Lenzioni best when it comes to teams especially when sharing non expert material with action researchers…additionally concepts such as balancing “relational space” (the relational perspective on the world) with action and conceptual space (the latter which I have written about in Organizational journals might be helpful. – Hilary Bradbury