Summary of
My Previous Work
"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.
1. Schedule
