The dual imperatives of action research

By J. McKay, P. Marshall. Information Technology and People, 2001

830 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Action research (AR) is not without its critics, and those who reject some of the paradigmatic assumptions embodied in AR maintain that AR is little more than consultancy, that it is impossible to establish causal relationships, that it is difficult to generalize from AR studies, that there is a risk of researcher bias, and that generally speaking, it lacks some of the key qualities that are normally associated with rigorous research. The authors are sensitive to such criticisms, for although they are committed action researchers, they have elsewhere voiced their concerns about the quality of AR practice in the field of information systems. The authors argue that part of the issue concerns the way in which we currently conceptualize AR. In this article, the argument for a deeper and more reflective analysis of the meaning and full implications of AR is developed, culminating in a model of AR being developed that explicitly includes both a problem solving interest cycle and a research interest cycle. Important implications of this new model are articulated, with examples to illustrate these points being drawn from a real‐life AR study.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/34fa96db52a99e4063c952d2adaebb9ee658c2e3

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Management Science and Operations Research

1. Ola Henfridsson
2. Ned Kock
3. Rikard Lindgren
4. Ulrike Schultze
5. Kalle J. Lyytinen
6. Ole Hanseth
7. Maung Kyaw Sein
8. Sandeep Purao

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Ned Kock
2. Ola Henfridsson
3. Robert M. Davison
4. Rikard Lindgren
5. Ulrike Schultze

In Sociology and Political Science

1. Ola Henfridsson
2. Rikard Lindgren
3. Ulrike Schultze
4. Ned Kock
5. Robert M. Davison
6. Maung Kyaw Sein
7. Matti Rossi
8. Sandeep Purao

Citations in the corpus

• Principles of canonical action research (2004, background): “ McKay & Marshall (2001) contend that AR without theory is ‘not research’.”
• Design Principles for Competence Management Systems: A Synthesis of an Action Research Study (2004, background): “2004; Susman and Evered 1978) nor the newly developed framework for the dual imperatives of action research (McKay and Marshall 2001) addresses this dimension of action research in IS.”