Greenwood and Levin gave a historical progression of the concepts of action research. Many sources agree with Greenwood and Levin that action research started with Kurt Lewin (1939) with his seminal idea of doing research in the “field rather than [in] the laboratory” (Reason & Bradbury, 1998, p. 17). Greenwood and Levin stated that Lewin was a “social psychologist” who fled Germany when Nazism started to spread (1998, p. 16). Lewin developed a three step process for social change: “dismantling former structures (unfreezing), changing the structures (changing), and finally locking them back to a permanent structure (freezing) (p. 17). Greenwood and Levin further described that Lewin’s second contribution was his ideas on “group dynamics, identifying factors and forces important for development, conflict and cooperation in groups, [which] led to the concept of T-groups” (p. 17). Lewins’s ideas, according to Greenwood and Levin, was a “short-term intervention” rather than what it is today, which is “continuous and participatory learning process” (p. 18). Nevertheless, Lewin’s ideas on group dynamics have remained to be key to action research.
The next step in the historical development of action research that Greenwood and Levin described is the work done in Norway from “the Norwegian Industrial Democracy Project” which was led by “Einar Thorsrud . . . a psychologist and . . . human resource manager of a Norwegian company” (1998, p. 20). Greenwood and Lewin related the story of how a village in Norway was revitalized through the work of Levin and Nilssen (1988). The process of action research and “task forces” within the Norwegian population (p. 37) led to a refocus of the type of labor done by the village from smelting, which had lost its market, to fishing, tourism, building high end boats, and a knife factor (p. 40). Levin was “active in a number of AR programs in Norway and Sweden . . . [and] is a professor at the Norwegian University for Science and Technology at Trondheim . . . [where he] has been the leader in the creation of combined engineering and AR programs there” (p. 10).
Greenwood and Levin proposed a type of action research that has the goal of “democratic social change” which implement “democratic rules [which] guide decision making” (Greenwood & Levin, 1998, p. 11). Initially they entitled their school of action research as “pragmatic action research” (p. 11) but later in the article they called it “participatory action research (PAR)” (p. 174). For these authors democracy was important because it supports “multiplicity of meanings” and “respects and enhances the diversity of groups” (p. 11). As they stated, “we believe that diversity is one of the most important features of human societies” (p. 12); these differences that often divide groups are viewed by Greenwood and Levin “as a rich social resource that, when effectively mobilized, gives a group or an organization a much greater capacity to transform itself” (p. 12).
Greenwood and Levin divide PAR into two camps—northern and southern. The southern PAR “has clearer moral content . . . [and] its alignment [is] with the poor and oppressed of the world” (Greenwood & Levin, 1998, p. 175). The northern PAR is “co-opted and collaborationist with power holders” and because of that, their research does not affect the type of social change or power change that the southern branch is defined by (Greenwood & Levin, p. 175). They also linked southern PAR with radical feminism because both groups share the same agenda of “fundamental alteration in the distribution of power” (Greenwood & Levin, p. 176). Greenwood and Levin further defined PAR by differentiating it from “standard revolutionary praxis or orthodox labor organizing tactics” because it “relies much more on the knowledge analyses, and efforts of local people” (p. 177).
The final type of action research that Greenwood and Levin discussed is Participatory Rural Appraisal (PRA) (also know as Rapid Rural Appraisal, RRA) which is “strongly associated with . . . a single practitioner: Robert Chambers” (p. 246). Although they are highly critical of this type of action research because it has a “complete lack of baseline data” and it because it works from the outside either as a non-governmental organization (NGO) or non-profit organization, it can often be corrupted. As they stated, “PRA, through an array of techniques, in the hands of incompetent or insincere practitioners can become an empty formalism, a set of ritual steps to go through rather than a set of tools to be deployed differently as the complexities of local situations become better understood” (pp. 248-249). At its worst, PRA is an extractive approach to information in which data are gathered for the purposes of the development agency rather than for meeting the espoused intention of having the agency’s programs built to suit the needs of the community”(p. 249). PRA is further defined by the fact that it is a “short-term” project rather than the traditional time-frame of action research which is a long-term cycle of interventions, evaluations and adjusted interventions (p. 250). Because of being short-term, “PRA is not likely to alter exiting power relations” (p. 250). Even with their strong criticism of PRA, they finished their description by stating that “PRA is a far better option than previous practices for agencies that are the plainly coercive political arms of foreign governments” (p. 251).
