RESEARCH

IMO community is continuously innovating the horizontal leadership methodology working with action research. It is a type of research which stands alongside ‘traditional’ scientific research.  

It is characterised by allowing knowledge to be generated in the dynamic reality of socio-economic systems by activating the actors in the field to investigate the criticalities they experience and to transform them, following a systemic development perspective, in which change is linked to the ability to understand the context.

Open issues in international action research groups on which the work of IMO  colleagues connected to research institute and Universities   focused are:

  1. the quality of interactions and learning
  2. the possibility of transforming rigid structures within which pathways of change are initiated.
 

On these two points, the horizontal leadership methodology proposes interesting innovations and is in continuous development.

Why Action Research

Action research developed from a process of criticism of social theories and practices based on Cartesian rationality, challenging dualism and positivist science. It is proposed as one of the most effective tools and is being experimented in various socio-economic realities within an international cultural debate.

In action-research, the relationship between subject and object is intersubjective: both are social actors, product and producer of paths on the basis of a mutual relationship; the empirical object no longer has a passive role, but an active one, as does the researcher.

Action research becomes an indispensable tool for studying complex systems, considered, as Edgar Morin argues, a set of heterogeneous variables—subjective and objective—which can only be known in the study of their interaction.

The last three decades have in fact witnessed a transition in the way many scholars have viewed the relationship between theory and practice.

Academic insistence on the neutrality of the observer in investigation, the incidence of problems in real life, the overwhelming recurrence of structural crises almost everywhere have led many researchers in the socio-economic field to take new positions regarding the possibility of initiating the changes deemed necessary.

There has thus been a broad international debate and confrontation on these issues from the perspective highlighted by Gustavsen (in Reason, Bradburry, 2001): “if the social sciences are to help build the future and not just interpret the past, the descriptive-analytical tradition will have to be overcome”.

This debate continues in the annual international conference on action research (Reason P., BradburyH.,2008) within which IMO interacts.

In the laste 10 years in the debate of the international action research community, it emerged that:
  • sustainability is talked about, but the conditions for a sustainable culture have not been created, changes in behaviour rarely take place, and that the challenge is the link between design ideas and actual implementation.
 
  • the biggest challenges of the next industrial revolution focus on three main points:
    1. systemic thinking
    2. relational skills to engage people fully and collectively
    3. generativity, i.e. defining ourselves through what we want to create for the future
 
  • we are in a context of ‘deficit assumptions’ about human nature and the need to truly and actively involve people beyond mere conceptualisations of actions pertaining to planned change.
 
  • we need a paradigm shift that overcomes what has been defined as the ‘Cartesian Catastrophe’ in that it separates mind from heart, reflection from action, self from others, leading for example to conventional health research that excludes patients, and education development research that excludes students.

“If you want to truly understand something, try to change it”  (Kurt Lewin)