Kubler‐Ross′ stages of death and dying – denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance‐have formed the basis of much of the therapeutic work with the terminally ill. As death and dying are the ultimate instances of change in a person′s life, it is hypothesised that Kubler‐Ross′ work has an application to the theory and process of change. A four‐stage model of organisational change‐denying, dodging, doing and sustaining – based on Kubler‐Ross is presented. These four stages are linked to the four organisational levels, generating a seven‐phase framework that integrates the complex interplay of denying, dodging, doing and sustaining in the individual, the team, the group and the organisation.
In the context of business and management, action research operates in the realm of strategies, practical tasks, and structured hierarchical organizational systems in diverse industries and across multiple business functions and disciplines. This article reflects on action research in generating actionable knowledge in this particular domain and shares the authors' perspective on future developments. The reflection explores a small number of action research studies undertaken across multiple fields and disciplines in business and management and advances distinct common denominators that can guide further research and action and aid future reflection. Through the mode of interiority, readers are invited to engage in a similar reflection on their assumptions, questions, and insights in coming to judgement about the state of the field and its future.
Action research in the acute hospital environment is made complex by competing and unequal voices. Acute hospitals and care in this sense refer to those intended for short-term treatment of illnesses. Care is provided by specialist teams comprising members of different disciplines/professions and is overseen by a complex hospital management and administrative structure. The respective voices of different specialist fields, disciplines, managers and patients must continually interact with each expressing a different personal and professional worldview. Gaining support from managers, medical providers and medical teams usually requires an emphasis on the presentation of evidence in which objectivity and parsimony is ascribed greater value than more detailed narratives that include a patient's personal details and biography. A cooperative inquiry project with respiratory and palliative care nurses explored how palliative care needs of patients with advanced chronic obstructive pulmonary disease might be better addressed and comfort provided. This inquiry brought to the fore the value-based nature of everyday speech in which voices reflecting narratives of management, medicine, nursing, illness and disease were continually shifting. We came to understand meaningful participation as an invitation to consciously engage competing voices that are inherent in everyday practice with a view to delivering better comfort care to patients.
"Action research provides a framework for developing practice in healthcare. While developing practice typically implies a combination of patient centeredness, quality improvement and change, conflicts arise in how concepts such as patient centredness are defined. Developing practice invites attention to positionality and engagement with policy directives, trends in clinical care, and other disciplines each with their own language stratification reflecting particular sets of values and beliefs. Our process of engagement is value-based, requiring attention to different and often conflicting languages or worldviews. We understand practice development as responding to different calls from the system, our individual disciplines, patients and changing discourses in healthcare, each exerting different pressures at different times. This paper describes an action research project aimed at developing nursing practice through engaging with two conflicting philosophies of care. We illustrate the contribution made by a particular understanding of Bildung to engaging with positionality, different voices in healthcare and the context of care in a complex environment. Bildung, as self-cultivation, invites engagement with other as an underpinning for developing practice beginning with first person inquiry. The idea of Bildung drew attention to the local moral world of nursing and the experience of dual citizenship. Dual citizenship reflected engagement with conflicting care philosophies and notions of evidence." (author's abstract)
While debates about the nature of 'doctorateness' are prevalent in higher education, what this might mean in the context of insider action research, where action research is undertaken by members of an organisation or community, has not received any attention. This article explores how an insider action research engagement in a thesis and core project generates a synergy between the actions, a deep discipline knowledge, competence in research through first, second and third person processes, and competence in presentation can serve as a foundation for doctorateness. The dissemination contributes to a community of practice and inquiry.
"Action research and collaborative management research emerge from different traditions and each begins from a different foundational position in regard to action and to collaboration. Both are different from the traditional research, evaluative research or practitioner research orientations. From a grounding in a philosophy of practical knowing as social science, this article engages in a comparative theoretical exploration of action research and collaborative management research through a focus on the operations of human knowing which yield a general empirical method. It reviews the origins of each approach and how they differ significantly from each other in the context in which they operate, with consequent differences in how the research is implemented and how the relationship between the parties is structured. The general empirical method provides a critical perspective on assessing the quality of action research and collaborative management research in terms of dimensions of real-life action, the quality of collaboration, the quality of inquiry in action and sustainability. The aim is to develop understanding of how these two approaches relate to one another so as to advance knowledge of the different modalities or expressions that comprise the broad field of action- and collaborativeoriented research as a social science of practical knowing." (author's abstract)
Criteria for establishing the quality of action research is of increasing interest to researchers and practitioners however, it is not known how well these criteria are used. This review addresses this issue by appraising extant measures that assess quality in action research. Taking Coghlan and Shani's (2014, 2018) four quality factors: context, quality of relationships, quality of the action process and outcomes, this scoping review examines if and how these factors have featured as quality criteria. While all studies included in this review reported on the four quality factors, no study reported in any detail on how any of the factors were integrated with one another. Findings therefore highlight a significant gap in the monitoring and reporting on the quality of action research studies. Addressing these gaps will support the development of future action research aimed at mitigating the lack of quality associated with action research approaches.
Case studies are a useful means of capturing and sharing experiential knowledge by allowing researchers to explore the social, organisational and political contexts of a specific case. Although accounts of action learning are often reported using a case study approach, it is not common to see individual case studies being used as a learning practice within action learning sets. Drawing on a network action learning (NAL) project, this paper explores how the process of coaching, articulating, authoring, sharing and editing case studies provided a vehicle for learning and research within a NAL set. The intended contribution of this paper to the theory of action learning is to extend the range of learning practices to include the case study within the NAL set. It discusses how case studies act as boundary objects, which are artefacts that can be used to cross boundaries between groups in order to facilitate learning that might not otherwise occur.
Purpose Doctoral education (DE) is central to the development and application of operations management (OM) thinking. The European Doctoral Educational Network (EDEN) seminar on research methodology in OM is a structured initiative developed in 1999 by European Operations Management Association (EurOMA) and European Institute for Advanced Studies in Management (EIASM). This intensive five-day seminar has run annually since and, to date, has engaged 486 students. The purpose of this paper is to ask: what role has the OM EDEN seminar played in the formation and academic career development of doctoral researchers, and how has it contributed to the development of EurOMA as a community of practice?
Design/methodology/approach The authors developed a retrospective case on the design, launch and growth of the OM EDEN seminar employing two data gathering methods (collecting secondary and archival data, and a survey of four selected seminar participants) and a social network analysis.
Findings The EDEN seminar is an effective educational intervention in developing doctoral researchers and their subsequent academic careers. The seminar has also contributed to EurOMA as a community of practice, bringing faculty together to teach, write and publish leading edge contributions in research methods for OM.
Research limitations/implications The case is focused on the OM EDEN seminar only, within which the survey is limited to four of the early participants. While another set of participants might respond differently in detail, the authors' expectation is that participant perception of the role of the seminar would not change. The paper provides an exemplar for European academic associations to guide how they might explore the formation and academic career development of doctoral candidates within a community of practice.
Practical implications The seminar merits the ongoing support of EurOMA and EIASM, not just in educating doctoral students but also in bringing faculty together to publish leading edge contributions to the OM domain.
Social implications The paper draws on the areas of student formation, academic career development and communities of practice to illustrate the role played by the OM EDEN seminar.
Originality/value This paper is the first description, analysis and reflection on the role played by the OM EDEN seminar.
The recent slowdown in the global economy has been a trigger for discontinuous change, prompting many organisations to re‐examine their collaborative strategies. This paper, focuses on the management of collaborative relationships in a period of discontinuity, presents, compares and contrasts three case studies, each of distinctly separate systems integrators from within the high technology sector in Ireland. The case data presented were gathered in 2001 as part of CO‐IMPROVE – an EU‐funded action research project focused on collaborative improvement within the extended manufacturing enterprise. This paper presents a cross case analysis that examines different choices faced by these systems integrators in their management of collaborative relationships with their supply bases.
