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"What is involved, in practice, coming to a judgement? The Norwegian
family therapist, Tom Andersen, characterized himself as "a wanderer and
worrier," he was constantly reflecting on his ways of 'going on', on his
own practice, to further develop and refine them. Each new way came to
him, he said, on reaching a 'crossroads', a point when he felt unable to
continue any longer in the same way. But once he stopped doing what he
had come to see as ethically wrong, he found, he said, that the "alternatives
popped up almost by themselves" (Anderson/Jensen, 2007: 159).
What I want to discuss is the fact that, while we can say that we can quite
self-consciously and deliberately decide not to do something (perhaps
never again) at a particular moment, in a new and particular situation we
cannot be said to decide at any particular instant in time, positively what
to do. New ways of acting cannot be planned; they have to emerge. As
Lehrer (2009) suggests, coming to act in a way that seems to be for the
best in a particular situation is not something we can decide upon simply
within ourselves – judgmental work, in which we go out bodily, to relate
ourselves imaginatively and feelingfully to various aspects of our current
circumstances, aspect-by-aspect, sequentially, over time, seems to be required.
It is what the nature of this imaginative judgmental work feels
like, looks like, and sounds like that I want to discuss in this paper." (author's abstract)

"Theodore Taptiklis is a former McKinsey & Company consultant who,
over the course of a 40 year career in business and organizations, undertook
a wide variety of roles, including board member, senior executive,
strategist and change manager, business development manager, and
worked also in a variety of line-management positions as both an employee
and as a professional advisor. He characterizes his professional life
during that time as a progression from, not only a position of arrogant certainty
to one of increasing ignorance, but also as one from realizing the
all-consuming pervasiveness and insidiousness of traditional management
doctrine (managerialism) to the possibility of more authentic and liberating
ways of experiencing organizational life. The starting point for this
process of 'unmanaging' ourselves, he suggests, is what we can notice
each moment in our experience of the activities occurring between us in
our everyday lives – a move from understanding our own practices as outside
observers of them to engaged participants within them." (author's abstract)

"Action research is often criticized for not being properly based in objective
facts or for not formulating testable theories, in short, for not being properly
scientific. But with what kind of science should it be contrasted? Hanson
(1958) distinguishes between finished, (classical) sciences and research sciences.
Unlike a finished science that can be conducted by us as individuals
within an already well formulated disciplinary discourse, a research science
cannot. If it is to inquire into possibilities not yet actualized, it must be conducted
in a much more situated, conversational manner. Thus as researchers,
instead of functioning as detached observers, seeking to discover the invisible
or 'hidden' causes of an observed event, we must operate in an ongoing realtime
situation in a much more dialogical manner. For such dialogicallystructured
activity can, within the dynamics of its unfolding, give rise to transitory
understandings and action guiding anticipations of a 'situated' kind,
thus enabling all those involved in such activity to 'go on' with each other in
unconfused ways. It is this participation in a shared grammar of felt, moment
by moment changing expectations that are – in the interests of a decontextualized
objectivity – precluded (or 'lost') within the disciplinary discourses of a
finished science. Thus, guided by Wittgenstein's (1953) writings in his later
philosophy, I want to show in this article that, not only is it more accurate to
compare action research with research sciences than with classical sciences,
but that action research can find its intellectual legitimacy in the same sphere
of human conduct as all of our sciences – in people being responsibly accountable
for their own actions to the others around them in terms of their
immediate relations to their shared surroundings." (author's abstract)

"To talk and to think, not about process, but in relation to it, is not easy.
Many brilliant writers and thinkers in the recent past have helped us to
think about process from the outside, about processes that we merely observe
as happening 'over there', but few have helped us to think in terms
of our own, spontaneously responsive involvement in ongoing processes
from the inside. Yet practitioners need a style of thought and talk that allows
them uniquely to affect the flow of processes from within their own
unique living involvements with them. Crucially, I will argue, this kind of
responsive action and understanding only becomes available to us in our
relations with living forms if we enter into dialogically-structured relations
with them. It remains utterly unavailable to us as external observers.
I will call this kind of thinking, thinking-from-within or "withnessthinking,"
to contrast it with the "aboutness-thinking" that is more familiar
to us. In articulating its nature, I will draw on the work of Bakhtin and
Wittgenstein, along with Vygotsky, Merleau-Ponty, and Polanyi. Central
to it and quite unavailable to us in aboutness-thinking, is our subsidiary
awareness (Polanyi, 1958) of certain "action guiding anticipations" and
"transitory understandings" that become available to us within any ongoing
processes in which we happen to be engaged, such that we can always
have an anticipatory sense of at least the style or the grammar of what next
might occur." (author's abstract)

Workers in cognitive science and artificial intelligence assume that everything of importance to our intelligent functioning can be found inside the heads of individuals. This article takes a different approach. The nature of our disorderly, everyday, dialogical activities is first outlined, because it assumes that it is only in terms of this usually unnoticed background activity that we make sense of everything individual and distinctive we do in relation both to each other and to our larger surroundings: We constitute what we are pleased to call our individual minds and our world within it. Furthermore, it is in the unique variations that we each introduce into this constitutive activity that we can express ourselves, our own "inner lives." Studies in cognitive science and artificial intelligence lead us not only to ignore these backgrounds but to institute forms of human relation leading to their eradication.