It is a great honour to be here at your conference in Bangladesh and to be invited to respond to Anisur Rahman's opening address.

It is especially significant for me, given that the poverty about which this conference is concerned is a considerable extent brought about by the past colonial policies of European countries; and kept in place by the current international economic regimes and by the dominance of positivist and reductionist ways of knowing which have their origin in the European Enlightenment. My view is that the twin crises of poverty and sustainability are the key issues which the human global community is facing, and which we have to address from our very diverse places on the planet (Reason, 2002). But our advocacy of participation and action research as part of the way forward may be something we have in common.

Fair Shares. Let me start with a story from our own research. We recently completed a project, funded by the UK Home Office, to conduct action research groups to explore the governance of community groups. This word 'governance' is a strange one, belonging more to the language of government bureaucracy than to the experience of people in community organizations, so we had to keep translating to find a way to make sense of the ground. One of the three strands of co-operative inquiry we initiated was with the Fair Shares Time Bank Scheme in the North Cotswolds-a rural location situated at the border of 4 counties, distant from all kinds of services. The Fair Shares provided a means by which participants could exchange skills and resources and develop self-reliance. My colleagues discovered that the three years government funding which has established the project was coming to an end, the paid organiser moving on, leaving a small part time staff and many participants with no plans about how to move forward.

When the group was approached by my colleagues it seemed that the first response of the staff was that this would be another formal strategy meeting, exploring how to get more funding by filling in forms with tick boxes and making up more stories to please funding organizations. But as they opened the meetings to involve the participants as well as the staff, and as they worked with the group to think more creatively, the focus changed from how to get funds to continue as we were toward how to become self-organizing-lateral thinking, as one of the participants put it.

The story they told went something like this. We realized how restricted we are by the boundaries of funding organizations. We made a shift to working on how to become self-organizing and self-sufficient, getting participants fully engaged. We realized that chasing money means that you lose your vision of what you are trying to do. It was like a light bulb coming on when we saw it differently-these are bold questions to ask because they deconstruct the formal bureaucratic questions.

It seems to me that this story mirrors the points Anisur Rahman makes early in his talk (Rahman, 2004) about moving away from a dependency creating situation:

Young Women in Management. A second example of our work is of a co-operative inquiry with young women in management in a multinational organization to look at their experience and practice in the organization (McArdle, 2002, in preparation). The group was established as a space within which the young women could explore their experience without any of the pressures of a specific agenda that would be usual in such a company. The group met together every four weeks on-site at the host organisation, sharing their stories and ideas from the four-week action phase between meetings and in doing so opening space for new conversations about their experience in the organisation-conversations which ranged from concerns about self-presentation, how they were addressed, the absence of female role models, bullying, and so on. One of the most valuable inquiry practices, which developed over the life of the group, was 'really listening' to each other (as something different from 'waiting to speak'), thus opening a space for new conversations about the experience of being young women in management. This helped them become aware of how their voices were largely absent in the organization. Group members brought their observations and concerns to the group, told stories of their experiences, and reported back the outcomes of action experiments which they undertook away from the group, and were encouraged and helped to develop new ways of responding to their experiences. Most important was the creation of a critical perspective, so that problems experienced by group members were no longer always 'their fault' but could be seen as part of the culture of a masculine-oriented organization requiring a creative response.

The inquiry skills nurtured and developed face to face in the group enabled a more engaged practice in the wider organization. The young women together held a half-day third-person inquiry with over 50 people, including other young women in the organization and senior women in the company, to enable themselves and others to gain further understanding of issues of interest to women in the company. This may sound like nothing new-workshops happen all the time in organizations! However, because they had developed a face to face community of inquiry over a ten-month period, group members were able to create and hold a wider inquiring space. They were careful not to re-create the hierarchy that existed 'in normal workshops' in the company, in which people were rewarded for 'knowing the right answers', but through

This is not the place to discuss in detail the skills and practices of democratic action, but the following issues seem important.

Taking time. Creating democratic spaces takes enormous amounts of time and care. It is easy to bandy about words like participation, and these days some funding bodies like them. But the process of drawing people together and creating a framework for collaborative work always takes longer than one imagines. At times building collaboration will seem to get in the way of directly addressing practical problems.

Histories of oppression and silencing Last year at the World Congress of Action Research I listened to an African and a Dutchman talk as colleagues about their experience of trying to establish participatory groups in the north of South Africa. They spoke of the systematic neglect and intentional deprivation that this community had experienced under apartheid. And then the African man said, 'Just how do you form communicative spaces with people who have been so deprived?'

Working against denial. Where the issues are significant and profoundly difficult to address, there will be quite active processes of denial, which make it very difficult to sustain conversations. My colleague at Bath Elizabeth Capewell, working with communities which have experienced significant disaster (such as random shootings, major train or aircraft crashes or terrorist acts) finds that there is a strong tendency for people to deny the extent of the trauma and try to get 'back to normal' as possible; they often claim that their community is strong, that the children are resilient, and will recover naturally. This acts against any moves to open up spaces for dialogue and represses discussion of the impact of the disaster (Capewell, in preparation).

Errors of consensus collusion. Participation can have a shadow side in that human persons in primary association can band together in defence of their version of reality and refuse to countenance alternatives.

Tensions in facilitation. There is a constant and fascinating tension between the organizing ability and facilitation skills of an outsider-a professional action researcher, a community organizer, an animateur-and the community that is there to be helped. The outside facilitator is always in danger of 'helping' in a way that is not helpful because it is controlling or patronizing or suffocating, or just doesn't understand. The community is always in danger of irrationally rejecting the outsider or of becoming over dependent. For this reason action research facilitators must follow disciplines of reflective practice and carefully monitor their practice.

I would suggest we must attend to three points.

First of all, the creation, development and maintenance of democratic dialogue and the establishment of institutions for democratic inquiry are forms of action in their own right. The establishment of democratic dialogue may well be a far more important and compelling purpose in an action research initiative than the addressing of immediate practical problems.

Second, the establishment of participation in a world increasingly characterized by alienation and individualism is both far more urgent and far more complex than we allow ourselves to believe. We need to keep deepening our understanding of what we are up to.

Third, forming participative spaces takes more time, energy, skill, persistence, optimism and resources than we usually reckon on.

Action Research as many ways of knowing

One of the traditional claims of action research is that it addresses practical issues that are important in people's lives while also making a contribution to knowledge. 'Knowledge' in this sense can be taken to mean the propositional, abstract theorizing of academia. But if we want our research to be a truly living inquiry we must go beyond the orthodox empirical and rational Western epistemology. We must consider ways of knowing that are rooted in everyday experience, and are expressed through story as well as through concepts, and which directly support our practice (see, for example, Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, & Tarule, 1986; Heron, 1996; Park, 2001; Torbert, 1991) These many ways of knowing:

Of course, what we seek ideally is an integration of these three approaches.

First person. Anisur mentions the role of the outsider in several places:

We place a lot of emphasis on this self-reflective practice in our work with action researchers to develop the capacity for behaving in ways that are both collaborative and inquiring-for the demands of this practice are formidable. My colleague Judi Marshall has explored inquiry as an everyday practice, in a series of papers Researching Women in Management as a Way of Life (1992), and Living Life as Inquiry (1999), Self Reflective Inquiry Practices (2001) and Living Systemic Thinking (2002), which have led her through successive definitions of inquiry from research as personal process through research as political process to inquiry as life process. The idea of Living Life as Inquiry is based on the notion that very little in life is fixed, finished, clear-cut, and the inquiring practitioner is living continually in process: adjusting, seeing what emerges, bringing things into question

Most of our students engage in some kind of personal reflection to understand how their existential position and personal history influence their work in action research; and in systematic study of the actual inquiry practice-exploring in detail the congruence between their intentions, their practices, and the outcomes they experience (Fisher et al., 2000; Torbert, 1991)

We have long advocated personal development work-psychotherapy, martial arts, meditation and so on-as a way for individuals to build their capacity to learn from the challenges that arise in experiential inquiry. We have begun a more systematic inquiry into the ways in which mindfulness disciplines of Buddhist meditation may aid the practice of inquiry. In one PhD I examined recently which recounted a process of addressing poverty in Dublin, Ireland, the author drew on the meditation disciplines of the Jesuit order to monitor his motives and behaviour (Nolan, 2004). It seems to us that while it is difficult to make direct links, we can describe these as providing a foundational discipline for inquiry: an underlying quality of quiet mind, a capacity for less attachment to personal identity, and an ability to notice self concern and the manipulations of ego.

The key question here seems in finding the balance between withdrawal into personal practices and engagement in active work in the world, and of finding one's own place of contribution to the enormous range of issues that confront us

Second person. Face to face inquiry in small groups has always been a central part of action research-a key arena in which space can be opened and formed for new dialogue and exploration. Anisur mentions how members of an indigenous tribe (adivasis) were organized into camps to analyse the structural conditions of their oppression

We work similarly to constitute face to face groups to explore and develop their practice in a process we call co-operative inquiry (Heron, 1996; Heron & Reason, 2001). We do this not only groups of oppressed-as well as groups such as young women in management, black professionals and other relatively silenced groups we have initiated inquiry groups with medical practitioners into the theory and practice of holistic medicine (Reason et al., 1992), with members of police forces into leadership (Mead, 2002), with managers in a large construction company into their long term strategy for addressing carbon emissions in their operations.

If we see mindfulness practice as foundational for first-person inquiry, we might see a range of practices that develop learning communities that are both supportive and challenging-group dialogue (Isaacs, 1999), circle groups (Baldwin, 1996), public conversations etc-as foundational disciplines in second person inquiry.

The key tension here is between the creative, emancipatory work of the face to face community of inquiry and the broader political and structural conditions within which we all work.

Third person. Ken Gergen (2003) makes a useful distinction between first and second order democracy and suggests there are limits to first order democracy. First order democracy brings together groups of people who share a sense of identity in effective co-ordination about issues of common significance. While it is of vital importance, first order democracy has degenerative as well as generative qualities, and every movement in a generative direction creates grounds for degeneration (Gergen, 2003:50): every step which creates a sense of 'us' can create a sense of 'them', and the potential for alienation and hostility. Explorations of second order democracy are required to counter this.

First order democracy is essentially achieved by those processes of meaning making that bring into being the disparate voices of the culture. However, such first order processes do not seem adequate to the challenge of confronting the second order problem of conflicting traditions of meaning. The discourses of the real and the good that sustain any particular tradition seem ill suited to the task of hammering out a rationale for mutual viability. The discourse of creating identity boundaries is not adequate to the challenge of crossing boundaries. Alternative forms of discourse are required, second order intelligibilities and actions that enable us to soften the edges of otherwise embittered and embattled traditions. (Gergen, 2003:52)

In a related manner, Bjørn Gustavsen has done the action research community a great service with his exploration over several years of the issue of scale and wider influence in action research. He has argued that we need to extend the relatively small scale of individual action research 'cases' so that "rather than being defined exclusively as 'scientific happenings' they (are) also defined as 'political events'" (Toulmin & Gustavsen, 1996:11); in a recent paper he develops the argument, suggesting that action research will be of limited influence if we think only in terms of single cases, and that we need to think of creating social movements, which he sees as events interconnected in a broader stream (Gustavsen, 2003a). Gustavsen writes that his core concern is for the movement for democracy and participation; other social movements in a 'search for a world worthy of human aspiration' (Reason & Bradbury, 2001) embrace justice and sustainability (Reason, 2002): feminism, anti-racism, peace, responsible business, and so on. In a subsequent paper (Gustavsen, 2003b)he suggests that we might see action research as a process of building social capital.

It is here that I am less sure of his arguments and whether I want to follow them. For it seems to me and my colleagues at Bath that in order to influence changes in society toward justice and democracy, and in order to engage people in an exploration of pressing issues of 'global significance', we need not only to build large scale networks of inquiry but also to engage in transformations of consciousness and behaviour at personal and interpersonal levels. While it is true that we cannot make large scale change on the basis of small cases, neither can we build truly effective and liberating political networks of inquiry without developing significant capacities for critical inquiry in the individuals and small communities which constitute them. Rather than argue that distributive networks are more important than the 'single case', we must seek means of integrating the personal with the political, linking first-, second- and third-person inquiry practices.

The challenge here is to find ways to integrate our first person processes of living life as inquiry, our second person transformational work in small groups and our wider work to establish inquiry as a basis for fair, just and sustainable societies. For as Anisur Rahman points out

Action research is full of questions and choices. Part of my purpose is to show the range of questions that action researchers may need to address, and to try to begin to suggest the different criteria against which quality in inquiry might be judged. You could never be part of an inquiry, which fulfilled all those dimensions fully, and completely; rather, you will always have choices about what is important to attend to at any particular moment. So a key dimension of quality is to be aware of the choices, and to make those choices clear, transparent, articulate, to your selves, to your inquiry partners, and, when you start writing and presenting, to the wider world.

Quality comes from asking, with others, what is important in this situation? how well are we doing? how can we show others how well we have done? I would also suggest that it is not necessarily a question of whether you have done well, but of how well you have done, and whether you have done well enough for the claims you may wish to make.

Sometimes, immediate practice is what is most important. Someone wrote to me recently and said, 'Peter, you are too hooked on liberation, transformation, and the emancipatory aspects of action research. Action research is sometimes about issues like how we can put dressings on wounds better.' Absolutely, sometimes it is.

But sometimes in action research what is most important is how we can help articulate voices that have been silenced. How do we draw people together in conversation when they were not before? How can we create space for people to articulate their world in the face of power structures, which silence them?

Sometimes, action research will be about finding ways to open ourselves to different sorts of realities, or finding different ways of telling stories. The Western mind, it is often said, is hugely individualistic, and that individualism drives the frenzied consumerism that is Western capitalism, with terrible consequences for the majority human world and the more than human world. Maybe action research could explore how the Western mind can open itself to a more relational, participatory experience

Sometimes action research will be more about, what is worthwhile here, what should we be attending to?

And sometimes action research will be about creating tentative beginnings of inquiry under very difficult circumstances, planting seeds that may emerge into large fruits.

References