"action inquiry" paradigm interpretation science Argyris publication life dialogue integrating publisher

If I examine my career as a social scientist through the lense of the 7 paradigms, I find the foreshadowings of the Developmental Action Inquiry approach appearing early in my undergraduate efforts to find kinds of knowledge that would help me put first things first and live a fuller life.

The four types of traditions I found (see Item #9"Major Influences) - Coffinesque 'action Christianity,' Argyrisian action research, Platonic dialogue, and Gurdjieffian self-study - were all explicitly concerned with the interplay of knowledge and action in everyday life, and two of the four - the Platonic and Gurdjieffian traditions - were also explicitly developmental in orientation, though not explicitly connected to modern developmental theory.

My first booklength empirical study was undertaken for my undergraduate honors major in Political Science & Economics, in collaboration with my roommate, Mac Rogers, who was in another interdisciplinary honors major: Culture & Behavior.

After a preliminary pilot study in New Haven, we spent the summer of 1964 conducting an interview and observation study of 209 blue collar workers in the machine tool industry in Columbus, Ohio, on an automobile assemble line in Detroit, and in a chemicals processing plant in South Chicago.

We coded the interviews and achieved extraordinarily impressive statistical correlations (accounting for 81% of the variance in their 'leisure involvement' by our measures of the degree of discretion and responsibility in their job and of their job satisfaction).

These findings disconfirmed the then prevalent thesis that workers could make up for impoverished jobs by leading enriched leisure lives.

Both as a wholistic, correlational study and as a thick descriptive study, this research epitomized the Gestalt Sociologism developmental paradigm.

This friend later became a very well-known psychologist (Zick Rubin-Brandeis) who turned to studying issues very important to him personally - liking and loving - and still later left a full professorship and tenure to become a law student and then join a law firm (I would find it interesting to try to tease out with him to what degree these major changes in focus represent either personal or paradigmatic developmental transformations).

My second major published study, Learning from Experience: Toward Consciousness, was originally conducted as my doctoral dissertation, with Chris Argyris as my principal advisor and committee chair.

My third major study to be published, Creating a Community of Inquiry, was actually the second to be conducted, during my first two years in the Yale doctoral program, since it was intended to serve as my dissertation research.

Although in published form it included a retrospective application of a developmental interpretation to the five cycles of development within the Yale Upward Bound program which I founded and directed, the original research was conducted more in the spirit of a Cooperative Inquiry than of Developmental Action Inquiry.

The intent had been to conduct a form of action research on the program and on my leadership of the program which could be of use to all participants in our ongoing organizing.

From 1978 on, I was serving fulltime as Graduate Dean of the Boston College Graduate School of Management and found it more feasible to complete articles than books.

I believe there is considerable evidence that the book 'worked' quite powerfully as it was intended to do, since it received an extraordinarily positive review in the Academy of Management Executive ("the most important management book since The Human Side of Enterprise") as well as more popular, business-oriented magazines, won a national award as the best professional school book published at any of the 28 Jesuit universities in the US that year, was the subject of an Academy of Management Symposium featuring Karl Weick and Bob Quinn, and was very well received by students ranging from freshmen to MBAs to PhDs.

Unfortunately, however, the publisher - Dow Jones-Irwin, which had seemed like the perfect bridge between the business and the academic world - was sold to Times Mirror three weeks after the book appeared and thereafter ceased marketing the book in any fashion and discontinued it as soon as the first edition sold out.

This became just one more chapter in the very odd history of publication I have experienced (which includes one publisher who stole all royalties before going out of business, and several other major publishers whose internal bureaucracies have prevented them from marketing my books across national boundaries and academic/business boundaries).

I felt that a Foreword by a major scholar who could relate The Power of Balance to my career long efforts and who could appreciate political philosophy, epistemology, developmental theory, higher education, and the action science approach could be very helpful for inviting new readers to engage with the concerns I address.

As my own Preface to the book indicates, this experience seemed to me to invite the interpretation that, contrary to my prior belief, Chris Argyris, Don Schon, and I are not closely allied in a vision and commitment to a fundamentally different paradigm of science from Empirical Positivism and Multi-Method Eclecticism.

Integrating subjectivity and objectivity - integrating first-person, second-person, and third-person research/practice is evidently not an aim of theirs, or one they can easily recognize as legitimate.

At the same time, through its dialogic format and in its interweaving of rhetorical and visual art, the book points to the possibility of a living dialogue with readers of the text.