The first thing to say about this book is that it is a tremendous piece of work: scholarly, concise, even-handed and admirably wide-ranging. The second thing is that it seems on the whole to be more about research and researchers than about action.

Action Research is one of those oxymoronic terms that seeks to capture a wealth of meanings in a short soundbite-worthy phrase. What is it? The general idea is that research, instead of being situated in ivory tower institutions and mentalities remote from the subject(s) being investigated, should - and this is a more or less moral imperative - be connected with its subjects and should involve them directly. This precludes the separation of research concerns from individual human issues that permits traditional statistical scientific research in a positivist or Popperian (refutationist) vein. It should therefore be a participative undertaking, closely concerned with practical action rather than something done in order to obtain secondary things like technical papers, kudos, and academic advancement. This line of thinking leads to a democratic if not socialist political standpoint, where people - subjects and researchers - are equal in value, however inarticulate, and where practical results are a better measure of effectiveness than the number of times papers are referenced. Similarly, it leads to a philosophical position in which Aristotle's primacy of the intellectual over the emotional and practical is seen as oppressive, possibly prejudiced and certainly misguided. (The philosopher Stephen Toulmin similarly undermines Aristotle's over-emphasis on logic in argument, showing that you need to consider argumentation in more depth than can be formulated in a syllogism; proof in a court of law is a complex matter, involving people's feeling for the weight of evidence.)

This position has immediate practical consequences: the Action Research community writes up its results in a style and with contents that the Establishment simply does not like. Morten Levin and Davydd Greenwood explain:

"co-generated knowledge means that the professional researcher is only one thinker/actor among many. Ideas are built and tested collaboratively and the attribution of intellectual 'property rights' is difficult. In the metabolic structure of universities, professionally authored articles in 'peer reviewed' journals are the currency of the realm. Action researchers, with long lists of non-professional collaborators and highly narrativized research reports, are placed in a defensive position…"

Action Research, in other words, has a revolutionary agenda.

All this is heady stuff, so it is with slightly heavy heart that the reader realizes that each chapter of the book - indeed, even the introduction - comes with a complete academic apparatus: a page at least of references to books and papers, a densely-argued narrative, appeals to authority, statements of position and the sound, just audible in the distance, of axes being ground. In the name of the people, the tyrant of scientific method is overthrown - to be replaced in his palace by the People's Committee of revolutionary methods.

What is wonderful in this book is that for the first time - pace Uwe Flick's excellent Introduction to Qualitative Research - a single volume has succeeded in providing a readable comparative tour of what seem to be all the main strands of Action Research, written by the practitioners themselves. The editors have achieved the prodigy of marshalling the authors into a harmonious sequence. Each chapter is strictly limited in length to ten pages, and needless to say all those arguments and references have been carefully checked and formatted.

The book is divided - after the introduction, which is itself a state-of-the-art review article of a dozen pages - into four parts, each of about a dozen chapters: Groundings, Practices, Exemplars, and Skills.

This is a big book, in every sense, and there are far too many well-written chapters and elegantly-explained ideas even to mention here, so I will simply touch on a few in a non-random personal selection. The book repays many kinds of reading, from quick reference via the index or summaries, through casual dipping and - no doubt - to detailed study. I fancy some of the chapters could work very well read out loud.

Participatory action research may sound exotic, given our society's emphasis on the individual in both academic and industrial career structures. But in truth, every project, consultancy and training course is a collaboration whose success depends on every participant - the traditional CV as a record of individual attainment is a striking fiction.

Happily there is at least a modest movement towards participation in business and IT. For example, Use Case analysis admits the central role of usually-human 'actors' in every scenario and business requirement. Similarly, Action Research is emphasizing that people know things by doing - skills as different as swimming and research are embodied rather than just understood.

Olav Eikeland points out that the "western tradition of knowledge production" running directly from Socrates and Aristotle has a hidden agenda behind the emphasis on the objectively known: that pupils should sit quietly and absorb while the teacher expounded the wisdom. Power went with knowledge.

If we are going to make systems that really work for people, then, as Robert Louis Flood writes, we must move from reductionism to 'systems thinking', a concept that includes social awareness, sound methods, and political fairness. Flood himself has done much to bring this sort of systems thinking into the world of Information Systems, though it remains quite technocratic - and requirements engineers still have a lot of work to do to bridge the gap between 'users' and 'systems'.

How valid, though, is a position that vehemently opposes - as most of the authors seem to do - the successful western analytical tradition? Victor Friedman writes that

"Technical Rationality has worked extremely well in engineering and medicine, but not in social work, education, psychotherapy, policy, urban planning, and management."

I think we might disagree about how well the separation of technical from human concerns has worked in software engineering; after all, if systems do not do what people want, they are of little use.

But Friedman is both setting an agenda and carving out a territory. Is he right? Should there not be a rational, experimental basis to education and management? The question hinges on whether situations involving humans are largely repeatable and predictable, or fundamentally different every time, personal and unique. For me, the distinction is nowhere near as sharp as for the authors. For example, the behaviour of every driver in a traffic jam is unique, but the mass, emergent behaviour of the stream of traffic is predictable and can indeed be modelled hydrodynamically with good results. People should be consulted about their schools, hospitals, urban environments, and politics; but rational models can and should be used to assist decision-making.

Several authors reflect on the methodology itself. Edgar Schein helpfully constructs a taxonomy of types of research based on three axes: the degree of researcher 'involvement'; the degree of client involvement; and whether the researcher or the client initiated the project. For instance, where the researcher/consultant starts the project but no-one is heavily involved, you get dry demographic studies (statistical analyses of data). Where both are fully involved, you have Action Research in all its forms - seemingly at least 40 of them. Conversely, where the client calls for the project, and both consultant and client are fully involved, you have process consulting. All these modes, and others that Schein identifies, make excellent sense in disciplines such as business process modelling and requirements engineering, not to mention conventional and social research.

Helps include a splendid index, which distinguishes no less than 30 categories of 'social'; interesting notes on the contributors - another tour of the field, as many leading experts are represented; a preface which is the book in microcosm; and a condensed-reading chapter consisting of 10-line outlines of each contribution.

This is a textbook which can be dipped into, searched systematically, or mined as a source of further reading. Many Ph.D. theses will no doubt be planned through its calm pages. For non-academics, I fear that its many valuable findings and approaches will remain largely untouched: a challenge to the Action in every Action Researcher to get out there (on the World-Wide Web?) and be heard. For, really, everyone should know about, no, be involved in this.

© Ian Alexander 2001

A version of this review appeared in the European Journal of Information Systems.

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