Research Employees": An Action Research Method for Unlocking and Changing Organizations

A common approach in action research is that the professional researcher and the insiders define the problem together, share knowledge, execute social research techniques, take actions and interpret the results. This approach is called co-generative learning (Greenwood and Levin, 1998), Co-operative Inquiry (Heron, 1996) and Human Inquiry (Reason, 1994), to mention a few of the different flavors of action research. This approach presupposes that knowledge passing between the insiders and outsiders are understood. In this paper, we want to discuss how conventional experience can be supplemented by a work method we call “research employees”. This means enriching empirical data obtained by conventional social science method with the researcher’s own experience working as employees. The overall implication of this study is that the knowledge gained, is a more complex knowledge than the usual scientific knowledge of “knowing that”. From the point of view of unlocking organizations, there are three reason that an employee research project is favorable: • Validity • Legitimacy • Engagement To support our discussion, we use a case-study approach. The cases are our own action research projects in an automotive supplier and a hospital.