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Collaborative/cooperative inquiry (CI) is both a method for engaging in new pardigm human inquiry and a strategy for facilitating adult learning. Adult educators who use CI institutional settings must be aware of potential corrupting influences. The authors alert educators to three factors interjected by institutional affiliation that challenge the integrity of the CI process: financial support, power inequities and reporting requirements. These factors are examined in three different contexts: inquiries used for dissertation research, inquiries in the workplace conducted for proessional development, and multiple inquiry projects sponsored by an instituion to serve its mission.
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Close relationships between researchers and participants engaged in a feminst participatory action research project have brought joy and insight, but also challenges. Through the project the authors collaborate to enhance participants' careers and, among some, develop feminst consciousness. This paper discusses methodological and ethical issues that derive from the closeness of the relationships between many of the participants and the authors themelves. Subjectivities are explored, the issues associated with interpreting participants' stories, actions and conversations, the risk of perpetuating uncritical assimilation or colonisation for Maori participants, and the challenge of matching practice with ideals of emancipation for all women.
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Participatory action research is presented as a social research method and process and as a goal that social research should always strive to achieve. This paper describes the key features and strengths of participatory action research, and briefly analyses its role in promoting social change through organisational learning in three very different kinds of organisations. It is argued that participatory action research is always an emergent process that can often be intensified and that works effectively to link participation, social action and knowledge generation.
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How can action research be made more rigorous? This paper discusses action research, positivism and some major criticisms of action research by positivists. It then examines issues relating the conduct of IS research in organisations through multiple iterations in the action research cycle proposed by Susman and Evered. It is argued that the progress through iterations allows the researcher to gradually broaden the research scope and in consequence add generality to the research findings. A brief illustrative case is provided with a study on groupware introduction in a large civil engineering company. In the light of this illustrative case it is contended that effective application of the iterative approach to action research has the potential to bring research rigour up closer to standards acceptable by positivists and yet preserve the elements that characterise action research as such.
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Women's empowerment is a central aim of feminist action research. However, due to the many contradictory discourses of empowerment, it has become a contested concept. Drawing on poststructuralist theories of power-knowledge, discourse and subjectivity, this article critically analyses the discourses identified in an Australian feminist action research porjcect involving rural women, academics and industry partners. This project aimed to empower women to discuss and use interactive communication technologies (ICTs). This analysis highlights the contradictory effects of the egalitarian and expert discourses that were identified, and the multiple, often conflicting, subject positions that were taken up by the researchers and participants. Our analysis suggests that discourses of empowerment and disempowerment intersect and interpenetrate one another, and highlights some of the dangers and contradictions associated with feminist participatory action research. We argue that a poststructuralist appproach to analysis and critical reflexivity can lessen the "impossible burden" on academic feminists engaged in emancipatory research.
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This paper focuses on the research strategy that the author employed during doctoral studies. An overarching framework of Action Research (AR) was used in the development of a complementary approach to creative studies. At the time of the studies AR seemed to be a "natural" choice and the author was not overly concerned with exploring why that was the case. However, she recognises the value of contemplating the appropriateness of research strategy and, in this paper, reflects on some of the parallel strands implicit in AR and in "critical creativity" that she now realises served to enrich the overall research process.