Higher Education 23: 195-208, 1992. �9 1992 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed m the Netherlands.

Action research in graduate management research programs

C H A D PERRY & ORTUN ZUBER-SKERRITT

Queensland University of Technology, Griffith University, Australia

Abstract. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how action research may be applied to graduate management research programs. After distinguishing action research from traditional research and establishing that the former is more appropriate for developing managerial competencies than the latter, the paper discusses issues of conducting action research within a graduate management research program. These issues centre on the key concept of distinguishing between action research project and a thesis action research project. Distinctions between action research projects at Masters and PhD levels are noted. It is argued that ideally the core action research project has to be part of the PhD candidate's full-time work. Future difficulties are canvassed.

Introduction

How can graduate research be made more relevant to management practice?

Currently, much management research is written for an academic audience only.

Research output is usually perceived by academics to be the distinguishing characteristic of 'better ' higher education management schools (Porter and

McKibbin 1988, p. 174). However, this research output is of dubious relevance to

managers. In the Harvard Business Review, Behrman and Levin (1984, p. 141) state:

For the most part, given the thousands of faculty members doing it, the research in business administration duing the past 20 years would fail any reasonable test of applicability or relevance to consequential managment problems or policy issues concerning the role of business nationally or internationally.

Moreover, Porter and McKibbin (1988, p. 170) surveyed some 200 senior US

executives who were ' among those most interested in, and knowledgeable about,

business schools and business school education. They found that the executives'

view of the direct effect of academics' research management practice was scathing:

...as far as we could tell, many key managers and executives pay little or no attention to such research or its findings. The direct impact appears nil. ...not a single (executive) who was interviewed cited the research of business schools as either their most important strength or their major weakness. The business worldis, generally speaking (and omitting a few very specific exceptions such as certain areas of corporate finance), ignoring the research coming from business schools. The totalperceived impact is,judged by what we learned in some 200 interviews in the business sector, virtually nil. (emphases added)

So much for the direct effect of management research upon management practice. Management research is not even having an indirect effect on management practice,

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through graduates of business schools working as managers or as consultants. Porter and McKibbin (1988, p. 180) conclude:

...some of the knowledge of newly-hired managerial employees, especially recent business school graduates, may have been directly affected by the research of faculty members, but that link is not obvious to superior or senior colleagues. Similarly, consultants, hired by a company may themselves be quite up-to-date on contemporary research findings .... yet the bases of some of their approaches to business problems are not identified as originating from research carried out in business schools.

The situation in Australia cannot be claimed to be different from that in the US. Indeed, the Australian situation may be becoming worse. Because of the push for academic 'respectability' in former colleges of advanced education (Dawkins 1988), more and more research irrelevant to management practice should be expected.

This development should have at least two negative effects. Firstly, the effectiveness of academics' teaching of students pursuing careers as managers, must remain low. A survey of 50 Australian chief executive officers exposed a deep skepticism about the value of higher education management education programs for practising managers, with 'many business organisations tending to develop their own internal senior and middle management programs' (Limerick etal. 1985, p. 34).

Secondly, the stable trend of Australian doctorate graduations since the mid- 1970s (Australian Science and Technology Council 1987) is not likely to increase, because only those doctoral candidates pursuing an academic career will consider the traditional doctoral research program to be worthwile, and the 'boom' years of employment growth in higher education education appear to be past.

In brief, traditional management research appears to be irrelevant to management practice.

This paper addresses the relevance of management research for management practice by focusing on a new kind of graduate management research program. This approach can be justified in that graduate research programs contribute from 35 to 50 percent of university research (Powles 1984).

This paper proposes that action research is an alternative type of research which is appropriate to graduate management research programs. The paper has two purposes:

- to establish the relevance of action research to management practice; and - to outline characteristics of a graduate management program by action research.

This paper has three major parts. Firstly, action research is defined and compared to traditional research. Secondly, competencies required in management practice are reviewed and the relevance of action research to those competencies is established. Thirdly, characteristics of a graduate management action research program are proposed.

The term 'graduate management research' needs to be defined. This paper deliberately focuses on students in Masters and PhD degree progams within business/management schools of accredited universities who are required to

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produce research theses. That is, action research within schools of teacher education schools are excluded here (Kemmis 1990), as are minor research projects and assignments carried out in undergraduate and Masters-by-coursework degree programs. Limiting the paper to research Masters and PhD degrees means narrowing its focus to those theses which must demonstrate a mastery of research processes and procedures and of relationships within a body of knowledge which is worthy, in part, of publication; with a PhD thesis also making a distinct contribution to knowledge (Moses 1985). Thus this paper excludes the non-thesis research report format discussed in Winter (1989).

Limiting the paper to graduate management research also excludes action research/learning involved in management development programs (MacNamara et

al. 1990). This paper discusses only those dissertations and theses which have to meet the normal academic criteria outlined above for a research degree, and not the criteria for reports of management development and/or coursework programs (Pike 1983).

Action research/learning is used in management development courses at the Open University and in the Universities of Bath, Bournemouth, Lancaster and Manchester, among others. Action research/learning is also an established methodology in teaching (for example, Carr and Kemmis 1986) and in organisation development (for example, McLennan 1989). But this paper addresses the issue of action research in a more specialised area: graduate research within normal higher education programs. This paper's grounding in the authors' experience of working with ten management Masters and PhD action research candidates in these programs provides new insights for supervisors and potential researchers in management education.

It should also be noted that this paper concentrates on management research rather than organisational research. That is, a distinction is made between action research employed primarily for organisational development purposes and action research employed primarily to study management practice. Management practice will involve some organisational development aims, but it will primarily target more direct managerial activities such as strategic planning.

What is action research?

Before forther discussing action research, its meaning should be clarified. A working definition of action research jointly authored by participants at a recent International Symposium on Action Research (Altrichter et al. 1991, p. 8) is provided in Table 1.

The working definition of Table 1 appropriately emphasises three key aspects of action research:

- a group of people at work together; - involved in the cycle of planning, acting, observing and reflecting on their work

more deliberately and systematically than usual; and - a public report of that experience (such as a thesis).

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Table 1. Working definition of action research.

I f yours is a situation in which - People reflect and improve (or develop) their own work and their own situations - by tightly interlinking their reflection and action - and also making their experience public not only to other participants but also to other persons

interested in and concerned about the work and the situation, i,e. their (public) theories and practices of the work and the situation

and i f yours is a situation in which there is increasingly - Data-gathering by participants themselves (or with the help of others) in relation to their own

questions - Participation (in problem-posing and in answering questions) in decision-making - Power-sharing and the relative suspension of hierarchical ways of working towards industrial

democracy - Collaboration among members of the group as a 'critical community' - Self-reflection, self-evaluation and self-management by autonomous and responsible persons and

groups - Learning progressively (and publicly) by doing and by making mistakes in a "self-reflective spiral' of

planning, acting, observing, reflecting, replanning, etc. - Reflection which supports the idea of the '(self-)reflective practitioner' then Yours is a situation in which ACTION RESEARCH is occurring.

It is important to note thatthe above definition of action research distinguishes action research from action learning (for example, Revans 1982) in that action research necessarily focuses on a workgroup, all of whom are involved in the plan / act / observe / reflect cycle. In contrast, action learning emphasises individuals learning. Admittedly, the set of associates or 'comrades in adversity' in action learning is a group, but each individual within that group learns from separate experiences which do not necessarily involve other associates, and the separate experiences may not even involve workgroups. Action research involves action learning, but not vice versa, because action research is more deliberate, systematic, critical, emancipatory, rigorous and public, that is, documented in a publication.

Traditional research can now be differentiated from action research. The paradigms of the two are different. According to Bawden (1990, p. 32),

we can talk of the systematic methods of experimental, positivist, reductionistic, deterministic natural science. We can refer to the methods of post-positivist, empirical, constructivist, interpretative social science. (emphases added)

In traditional research, the researcher is separated from the system being researched by a 'hard ' boundary and the system is reduced to one or only a few parts, with the rest of the system assumed to be held constant. This research is appropriate in some circumstances, especially in the natural sciences, for example, research into the effect of fertiliser on a plant.

On the other hand, action research involves social systems of which the researcher is unavoidably a part. These are 'soft ' systems without clearly defined boundaries

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between the researcher and the system. The researcher actively participates with others in the critical exploration of complex and dynamic issues which relate to the relationships between people and their physical and socio-cultural environments (Bawden 1990, p. 40).

Because the research involves complex and dynamic problems, exploring the social process of learning about situations is inextricably linked with the acts of changing those situations. For example, one of our candidates elected to research the method of eliciting information from individuals within ten different nominal groups; this was traditional research with most parts of the system hopefully held constant. On the other hand, action research would have been appropriate if the candidate had been a member of a management group within an organisation and studied the group's use of the nominal group information to plan, implement, observe and reflect upon the organisation's marketing plans.

Thus traditional research is appropriate for clearly defined hard systems, while action research is appropriate for the soft systems of management practice.

In brief, traditional and action research both have roles to play in management research, and action research may use the results of traditional research. Never- theless, when management research extends further into the practices of work- groups, the scope for action research should increase.

Managerial eompetencies

In the previous section, action research was described as involving workgroups in management practice. This section explores the issue of management practice further, and establishes that action research is more appropriate for developing management competencies than traditional research.

What do managers do? If managers simply needed to possess the ability to think clearly, then the conceptual and analytical skills developed in conventional management research programs could conceivably be useful, even if what candidates thought about was irrelevant. Indeed, if only conceptual and analytical skills were required, then research in engineering or the liberal arts may be as useful as management research. However, management requires far more than conceptual and analytical skills, as at least four studies have shown.

The first study was carried out for the American Management Association (Evarts 1957). Costing more than $1 million, the study correlated specific competencies with observed managerial performance of 2000 practising managers in 41 different types of positions in 12 organisations, in both the private and public sectors. Eighteen generic competencies were identified, clustered in four groups:

- g o a l a n d a c t i o n m a n a g e m e n t - efficiency orientation, proactivity, impact, conceptual skills;

- d i r e c t i n g s u b o r d i n a t e s - power, development of others, spontaneity; - h u m a n r e s o u r c e m a n a g e m e n t - self assessment, self control, stamina, objectivity,

positive regard for others, group processes, socialised power; and

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- l e a d e r s h i p - self confidence, creative conceptualisation, logical thought, oral presentations.

The American Management Association competencies include some conceptual skills (for example, 'logical thought'). But only five or six of the 18 competencies could be considered to be exercised in traditional graduate research (including 'stamina and adaptability' and 'efficiency orientation' among them). But the major emphasis in the 18 competencies is the application of those skills in a workgroup setting, involving the interrelationships between the manager and groups (including the organisation as a whole and subordinates, peers and superiors). At least ten of the 18 competencies - that is, most of them - refer explicitly to workgroup competencies, which are appropriately exercised in action research within an organisation, for action research is methodology directly involving workgroups of practitioners. In brief, action research is management practice.

The advantages of action research in management research and development are also apparent in a second set of competencies. Burgoyne and Stewart (1978) identified eleven competencies in UK managers:

1. command of basic facts 2. relevant professional knowledge 3. continuing sensitivity to events 4. analytical, problem-solving, decision (judgement-making skills) 5. social skills and abilities 6. emotional resilience 7. productivity - inclination to respond purposefully to events 8. creativity 9. mental agility

10. balanced learning habits and skills 11. self-knowledge

Traditional research could kindly be said to exercise only five of the eleven competencies (items 1,2, 4, 8 and 10). Action research goes beyond these to include workgroup-specific competencies (items 3, 5, 6, 7 and 9).

In a third study of management competencies (Limerick e t a l . 1985), chief executive officers of 50 Australian organisations were asked to identify com- petencies necessary for senior management. Competencies and their frequency of mention were:

people management 82% outward orientation 80% proactivity 76% personal attributes 64% cooperative skills 50% macrocompetencies 44% conceptual and analytical 26%

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One of the seven competencies - the last - refers to skills targeted in traditional research. All the others are workgroup-specific competencies exercised in action research.

Finally, a fourth list of competencies also reinforces the advantages of action research. Cunnington and Trevor-Roberts (1986) content analysed the responses of the 200 Australian chief executives referred to above and isolated five clusters:

1. ability to manage and relate to people (65 mentions) 2. ability to get things done (52) 3. ability to see the big picture (34) 4. ability to think clearly (31) 5. personal maturity (28)

Of these, arguably only items 2 and 4 might be exercised in traditional research, but the other three items will also be included in action research.

This review of four studies of managerial competencies demonstrates that traditional research is of limited relevance and use to management practice, while action research may develop additional, workgroup-specific competencies. Thus action research not only investigates and improves management practice, but it also develops the management competencies of the researchers involved.

An approach to action research in graduate management research

Action research has been defined and shown to develop more management competencies than traditional research. How can action research be incorporated into a graduate management research program to the candidates' advantage? This question may be answered by reflecting on our experience of working with ten Masters and PhD candidates involved in action research.

Core and thesis action research projects

A key concept in a graduate management action research program appears to be the identification of two distinct action research projects. The first of these is the core action research project involving the candidate within a workgroup of practitioners. The report of this project will therefore be like most action research reports, that is, written in the first person plural, in narrative form and making comparisons of the situation before and after each plan/act/observe/reflect cycle (Winter 1989).

One of our PhD candidates is a training consultant and had to differentiate between his core action research project and a traditional research project. His core action research project involves a group of trainers within his consultancy, improving the processes used to plan, deliver and evaluate their training programs over about twelve months. The action research report must tell this dynamic story, with himself as a participant. In contrast, if the candidate had opted for a traditional

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research project, he might have surveyed customers with a mail instrument which would have taken about 15 to 30 minutes to complete. The report would have been a 'snapshot' of customers, and need not have referred to his own thoughts and feelings or to those of other trainers.

In addition to this core action research project, a second thesis action research project involves the candidate in a 'workgroup' of Masters/PhD action research 'practitioners'. In contrast to the core action research project, this thesis action research project concerns a workgroup akin to an action learning 'set of associates' and includes workshops of fellow candidates and supervisors aiming at fulfilling the conventional requirements of Masters and PhD theses. As demonstrated in Zuber- Skerritt and Knight (1986), workshops like these are supplementary to the single supervisor model and have been proved to be an effective method of doing graduate research. In these workshops the research processes are treated as similar to, but distinct from, the management processes of the core action research project.

In this thesis action research project, supervisors are simply members of the workgroup who work as co-researchers on issues of theory and methodology. Kemmis (1990) argues that supervisors should not only be advisers or facilitators, but should consider themselves to be co-workers on the action research project. However, our Masters and PhD candidates also recognise that they are primarily responsible for the thesis itself.

This distinction between two action research projects makes research planning by candidates much easier. For instance, one candidate wished to investigate cultural change. However, his core action research project involved the senior management group of a large organisation for whom cultural change was a minor concern compared to strategic planning. This conflict was only overcome when the existence of two action research projects was acknowledged: the core project's 'thematic concern' (Kemmis and McTaggort 1988) was strategic planning; and the thesis project's 'research problem' (Zuber-Skerritt and Knight 1986) was cultural change. The core project's thematic concern referred to the situation and processes of management practice; and the thesis project's research problem addressed intellect- ual propositional knowledge.

Of course, the research problem of the thesis action research project must be stated early so that it is easy for the candidate to justify the use of a core action research project. In any thesis, using either traditional or action research, the methodology adopted must be justified. For example, in traditional research, a chi-square methodology can be justified if the research is exploratory (that is, asking what are the variables involved?); but if the research problem involves relationships between the variables, then regression or a similar methodology should be preferred. Similarly, the research problems adopted in the thesis action research project should be appropriate to justify the use of a core action research project. Thus the research problem of the thesis should not refer to techniques or methods or comparisons across randomly selected samples; instead, the research problem should refer to processes of a workgroup and refer to comparisons through time as the workgroup reflects on its spiral of the planning/doing/- observing/reflecting cycles. If the research problem is stated in this form, then

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the methodology of a core action research is appropriate and easily justified. The linkages and distinction between core and thesis action research projects are

summarised in Table 2. This relationship between core and thesis action research can also be dia-

grammatically shown in the usual spiral of action research cycles. See Figure 1. As a rule of thumb, the duration of the core action research project should be no

more than one third of the candidature, with the rest of the time spent on the thesis project. For example, a three year PhD program should aim to include cycles of planning/acting/observing/reflecting of management practices for no more than one year.

Table 2. Relationships between core and action research projects

Core action research project Thesis action research project

Action

Working with workgroup's thematic concern through planning/acting/ observing/reflecting on management practices. Report verified by participants.

Planning of the thesis

/ Research problem, design and rationale. Literature survey. Justification of methodology.

[ NN~Observatio n in the thesis

| Description of research process and | procedure. | Analysis and evaluation of results of | action (content and process) in light of

literature survey.

Reflection in the thesis

Analysis of reflections by the practition- ers. Reflections by the candidate. Prop- ositional conclusions from the research (for example, a new theoretical model). Knowledge claims and limitations. Suggestions for further research.

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reflecting conceptualising

y writing first d r a f t ~

observing ]Thesis ! planning the thesis evaluating [ Research ] (research problem, the action | | design & rationale)

~ acting ) I Core AR Project l

y plan y

reflect Q act

Y observe ) /

revised _ ,r etc. ~plan ~ 1 ~ 3~

reflect @ act

Y observe ) /

Y observing evaluating, revising,

r_eflecting on thesis

Thesis Writing

planrning ~ final draft(s)

proof reading

~ writing ) final draft(s)

further research

Fig. 1. The relationship between thesis research, core action research and thesis writing.

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Differences between Masters and PhD theses

In traditional research, the major distinction between Masters and PhD theses is that the latter make a distinct contribution to knowledge. In action research, there are two additional characteristics of the hierarchy of Masters and PhD action research programs. A Masters core action research project need only progress through one planning/acting/observing/reflecting cycle of management practice to demonstrate mastery of the research methodology. In contrast, a PhD core action research project would probably need to progress through at least two or three cycles to uncover a distinct contribution to knowledge. Although these two or three cycles do not have to involve the same workgroup, the understanding gained in the reflection phase of the first spiral in the last workgroup should be transferred to the planning phase of the first spiral in another workgroup. For example, Zuber- Skerritt (1987, 1990b) transferred reflections from a group of academics teaching undergraduate students to a group of supervisors of Masters students, and then transferred their reflections to a group of teachers of Honours students.

A second difference between Masters and PhD research programs consists in distinguishing between technical, practical and emancipatory action research. Table 3 outlines these differences.

Carr and Kemmis (1983, p. 7) comment that only emancipatory action research is real action research:

Table 3. Types of action research and their main characteristics (after Carr and Kemmis 1986)

Type of action Aims Facilitator's role Relationship between research facilitator and

participants

1. Technical - effectiveness/efficiency of outside 'expert' co-option (of practition- educational practice ers who depend on

- professional development facilitator)

2. Practical - as (1) above Socratic role, co-operation - practitioner's understanding encouraging parti- (process-consultancy) - transformation of their cipation and self-

consciousness reflection

3. Emancipatory - as (2) above process moderator collaboration - participant's emancipation (responsibility

from the dictates of tradi- shared equally by tion, self-deception, coercion participants)

- their critique of bureaucratic systematisation

- transformation of the organisation and of the educational system

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Indeed, only emancipatory action research can unequivocally fulfil the minimal requirements for action research.., having strategic action as its subject matter; proceeding through the spiral of planning, acting, observing and reflecting; and involving the participation and collaboration in all phases of the research activity. (emphasis added)

In terms of the working definition of action research presented in Table 1, the system boundaries of technical and practical action research are hard, and only eman- cipatory action research would exercise all the managerial competencies identified above. We maintain a Masters thesis may be practical or emancipatory action research, but a PhD thesis should usually be emancipatory action research.

Given this requirement, candidates enrolled in a management action research PhD must be full-time managers and part-time students, because they would be involved during worktime in the core action research project which is part of their thesis. In other words, a full-time student without a job could not be an action research candidate. On the other hand, one could argue that in the last phase of candidature (that is, thesis writing) managers may take leave from their job and engage in full-time research and writing.

However, this interpretation would not be accepted by all authorities. For example, McLennan (1989) argues against the view that all members of the workgroup should be persons within the organisation system. As long as the external action researcher and the internal clients are 'mutually dependent on each other's skills, experiences and competencies to achieve problem solving, knowledge expansion and learning', and the success of the project is 'sufficiently desirable to all parties involved' (p. 536), then an action researcher can be a part-time/external member of the workgroup. McLennan's requirements for emancipatory action research would include process consultancies of practical action research, and not make a distinction between practical and emancipatory research, despite the differences in hardness and softness of the system boundaries involved.

This blurring of distinctions between practical and emancipatory action research may be an important consideration for some candidates. For example, if only emancipatory action research was suitable, university lecturers could not use a consulting project in a business as their core action research project; instead, they would have to use a project within their own academic department using other staff and/or students. On the other hand, if the lecturer's consulting projects were suitable as practical action research projects, then the lecturers could include their consulting project within their PhD thesis.

We have not yet decided whether only emancipatory action research is acceptable for PhD research. 'Consultancy' projects might be suitable provided the con- sultant/action researcher brought skills to the workgroup that would otherwise be missed and if the boundary of the consultancy was not 'hardened' by a strict fee-for-time payment schedule. The consultant/action researcher must be able to be a full member of the workgroup in a crisis without the boundary of crass financial considerations being involved. Academics or government-funded extension officers may be examples of such consultants/action researchers.

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Conclusions

This paper has addressed the problems of integrating action research into graduate management research programs. First, it described the meaning of action research and argued why it is more appropriate for developing managerial competencies than traditional research. Then the key concept of distinguishing between core and thesis action research was presented, and a qualitative difference suggested between Masters and PhD candidature in terms of number of cycles of action research and possibly in terms of practical and emancipatory research.

It has not been easy for us and our candidates to integrate action research into graduate management research programs. The literature appears to ignore action research in management education, and to ignore the complexity of presenting action research in the format required for a Masters or PhD thesis. Therefore, this paper may provide a foundation for starting to integrate theory and practice, research and management development. We have been spurred on by the irrelevance of alternative traditional research and the usefulness of action research to developing management competencies.

There are still several issues confronting us in the future. For example, the conflict between emancipatory action research and the bureaucracy of a business organisa- tion may be greater than that faced in emancipatory action research within a classroom or among teachers. Indeed, one of our candidates found it was essential to gain written support from the organisation's chief executive for his action research project, at its establishment, even though the chief executive was not a member of the workgroup. Moreover, because the 'political' forces of a business bureaucracy probably outweigh the 'professional' culture of teaching, dealing with the emotive aspects of group work may lead to more than usual bias by participants concerned with making their points (Reason and Rowan 1981). And extracting suitable theoretical propositions and models from the experience of the core action research project may be more difficult than expected. But, as Kemmis (1990, p.21) says:

research that is participatory and collaborative, let alone critical and self-critical, must evolve slowly if its development is to follow its own principles.

Acknowledgements

Comments by Dr Alan Buttery, Don Brinkworth and Tony Carr on an early version of this paper are gratefully acknowledged.

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