What is Good Action Research: Quality Choicepoints With a Refreshed Urgency for ARJ

As a stakeholder to AR+ you are hopefully familiar with our journal – Action Research. Much of our blog is devoted to making journal articles available.

If you’re an author, reviewer, reader of the AR+ blog, or any/all of those categories, you may be aware that our purpose since inception with ARJ, an international, peer-reviewed journal, is to offer a forum for participative, action-oriented inquiry into questions that matter – questions relevant to people in the conduct of their lives, that enable them to flourish in their organizations and communities, and that evince a deep concern for the wider ecology.

Our purpose has not changed. The world around the journal, however, has changed.

While globally there is much to celebrate, there is also an increased urgency as expressed in recent reports on climate change and resource inequality. Actions researcher are called to play an important role.

Action Research is a catalyst to successfully transmute the inexhaustible resource of human creativity in all spaces—self to society—toward addressing our global problems.

As outlined in more detail in the editorial to the Special Issue on Climate Transformations published in our first issue of 2019 mitigating the worst requires action research that draws on many other kinds and sources of knowledge. In fact, it requires drawing much more from diverse people on the ground who understand the problems at hand and can offer solutions anchored in their experience of what is meaningful for them.

The journal editors have recently launched an inquiry into how better to use the journal in support of action research for a more sustainable or regenerative society.

Acknowledging a new urgency: Refreshing the quality choice points

At ARJ we remain committed to offering a viable alternative to dominant ‘disinterested’ models of social science, and unreflective forms of everyday practice.  We have always welcomed – and would like to see even more – articles from practitioners outside academia. We aim to publish action research at the meeting point between local knowledge generation and meaningful action.

We believe that in updating the choice points by which we assess and develop quality we may continue to support this new urgency for clarity and methodologies in support of transformation. The times demand it.

The Seven Choicepoints for Quality in Action Research used in ARJ

Articulation of objectives.

1. Partnership and participation
2. Contribution to Action Research theory/practice
3. Methods and process
4. Actionability
5. Reflexivity.
6. Significance
7. Invitation to ARJ stakeholders

We invite all future authors to send articles which show multiple ways of knowing and declaring truths; we urge you to show how you yoke your efforts to a commitment to inquiry that makes a positive difference.

We ask that you show us how you work with others determines anew the boundary lines about whose knowledge matters, whose methodology counts, and how these questions are at the root of our survival and potential thriving as a learning species.

Show us the courage it takes to engage with the power dynamics that hold us on yesterday’s unsustainable paths. Help us understand where and why you have fallen short. We know that to do good work means always falling short of our ideals, yet remaining committed and learning along the way.

• The above is an excerpt from an expanded statement offered by the ARJ board, Hilary Bradbury, Kent Glenzer, Ben Ku, Dusty Columbia-Embury, Sofia Kjellström, Alfredo Ortiz Aragón, Rob Warwick, James Traeger, Marina Apgar, Victor Friedman, Hsiao Chuan Hsia, Svante Lifvergren, Paul Gray.
• The full statement is published in the first issue of Action Research journal 2019.