Editorial vision on quality work for Action Research

One of the major purposes of Action Research will be to establish a debate concerning the nature of quality in action research ventures and publications.  We need to do this not only for the development of the field, but in order to answer critics from outside. Clarifying our view of quality should, on the one hand, allow us avoid practice that is poorly articulated and, on the other hand, prevent our borrowing uncritically from traditional, yet inappropriate, quality standards.

Yet there really can be no pre-established rules for validity based on firm foundations.  Action research has many sources.  Contemporary practices draw strongly on the non-foundational traditions of constructionist thought  and pragmatism. While we find the French postmodernist movement often absurdly disconnected from practice, we do suggest that there is something of the spirit of Lyotard’s description of the postmodern artist in the practice of action research. Because there can be no preestablished rules:

Those rules and principles are what the work of art itself is looking for.  The artist and writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done.(Lyotard, 1979:81) 

One might therefore say that the primary ‘rule’ in approaching quality with our practice of action research is to be aware of the choices one is making and their consequences.  We need our concern for quality to move from 'policing' to stimulating dialogue. Thus in considering how we approach questions of quality in action research for the journal, we suggest as a first principle that the author explicitly address the qualities they believe relevant to their work and the choices they have made in their work.  However, since there is also considerable scholarship about the nature of quality both in action research and more broadly in critical, constructionist and qualitative inquiry, we might suggest also that the authors explicitly connect their own judgments to discussions in current literature.  

One such exploration of quality is our own in the Introduction and Conclusion chapters of the Handbook of Action Research. Drawing on this, we would see good action research as reaching toward the following qualities:

• be both aimed at and grounded in the world of practice;
• be explicitly and actively participative: research with, for and by people rather than on people; 
• draw on a wide range of ways of knowing—including intuitive, experiential, presentational as well as conceptual—as appropriate.
• explore the significance of their work to the flourishing of human community and the more than human world; 
• be emergent in form, starting from exploratory beginning, growing into a full flowering, and aiming to leave some lasting capacity amongst those involved. 
• Engage appropriately with first-, second- and third-person perspectives.

In addition, a good account of action research, and to qualify for inclusion in Action Research, articles 

• critically communicate the inquiry process instead of just presenting its results and some reflections on it.

We argue that no piece of inquiry can accomplish all these equally and no journal article can do justice to the entire range and that judicious choice needs to be made.  It might be that in one inquiry what is most important is to create new forms of emancipatory dialogue while in another it is to carefully check how claims to effective practice match descriptions of the external world.  However, in a major inquiry project extending over time, we would expect all of these issues to be addresses to some extent. Thus we would urge authors to be explicit about which criteria they judge to be most significant for their work and the issues they have chosen to explore in the paper.  We want them to show the quality of their thinking, that they demonstrate appropriate rigor and creativity, are self-critical and aware of their assumptions, and how they relate to significant literature.  It might be that for some papers the author’s choices with regard to quality criteria would be best presented in a covering paragraph rather than in the body of the paper.

Over time, we wish to write a longer editorial essay reviewing the development of quality criteria as they are manifested in the community of scholar/practitioners involved in the journal. Meanwhile, please find a review form that makes clear how we wish to translate our concern for quality into criteria for revision and acceptance of manuscripts.  Since we are hoping to stimulate an ongoing inquiry in these questions of quality, this form is in principle always open to revisions based on feedback from editors, contributors and readers. 

Of course it is also important to signal that we will are open to being delightfully surprised by a manuscript that seems to break will many of our expectations of quality and yet delivers a wonderful paper.