Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice (Hardcover)

`A wholly new kind of human inquiry is emerging. It is to do with taking our own, previously ignored, spontaneously responsive, living involvements with our surroundings seriously. Rather than with views and perspectives, rather than with a one-way manipulative understanding, gained by merely observing movements from a distance, it is concerned with quite a different kind of participatory, experiential understanding - the kind of understanding we have when playing a part in an activity which also to an extent `plays' us. Workers are beginning to bring to light the many different knowledges present to us in the different practical ways in which we can be relationally involved with the others and othernesses around us. Everything changes when we get up close and personal. All that is solid melts into air! In this exciting Handbook, Reason and Bradbury have collected together a large number of the central workers in this new and developing sphere of participative inquiry. Overall, in the detailed explorations they conduct, just as in becoming familiar with a new and strange landscape, they help us get to know our `way about' in its rich and intricate `landscape'. Literally, this is a landmark volume' - John Shotter, University of New Hampshire

`The Handbook of Action Research is truly a remarkable book. We are greatly indebted to the editors Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury, who managed to avoid the usual tower of Babel, and succeeded to forge and orchestrate the somewhat incoherent mosaic of action research, with its many voices, into an intelligent comprehensive and logical whole. This handbook provides a much needed clarification of a critical transition in the social sciences' - Hans van Beinum, General Editor of Concepts and Transformation, International Journal of Action Research and Organizational Renewal.

`A remarkable reframing of action research that engages the spirit as well as the mind, in inquiry that matters, shared among inquirers who matter. "Validity" as we once knew it will never be the same after these improvements. Wonderfully provocative!' - Karl Weick, University of Michigan

'A valuable resource for both researchers and for research methods courses' - Dr Ruth Northway, Nurse Researcher

"A remarkable reframing of action research that engages the spirit as well as the mind, in inquiry that matters, shared among inquirers who matter. ‘Validity’ as we once knew it will never be the same after these improvements. Wonderfully provocative!"