As I slowly prepare myself for the work I will be doing upon my return to Seva Mandir, I have been doing my best to get whatever I can out of google books. As elaborated in my Analtical Paper and also alluded to in an earlier post, I am finding myself deeply interested in the work, on the one hand, of Ralph Stacey (and others who subscribe to the theory of complex responsive processes), on the other, of John Heron and Peter Reason (whose work focuses on participative inquiry, including cooperative inquiry). The similarities between the work of these two parties keeps on striking me as greater than the difference on so many levels. Nonetheless, Stacey’s band seem to repeatedly highlight that their approach, which has also been termed ‘emerging participative exploration’ (Christensen in Stacey et al. eds, 2005, pp.99-105), is distinct from action research and also distinct from cooperative inquiry.
At the moment, I’m not entirely convinced that Stacey’s band have done a good enough job of clarifying the distinctions – particularly given that action research and cooperative inquiry are continuously evolving fields through which new forms and approaches are continuously emerging. For example, it appears that one of the distinctions made by Christensen (ibid) is to do with the insider-outside divide – i.e. that action research (including cooperative inquiry) locates researchers as outside of the system they are supposed to be researching and involves them in making diagnoses on the basis of which changes to the system can be made. However, from my (admittedly) limited reading of the cooperative inquiry literature, this is not the sense that I have taken from it at all!
Perhaps what emerges most strongly as the biggest difference between the two schools of thought is that ‘emerging participative exploration’:
- does not require/involve setting up special cooperative inquiry processes that are distinct from the general ongoing conversational life of the organisation.
- integrates reflection and action rather than treating them as distinct elements to be cycled through.
- places a particular emphasis on identity, power relations, repetitive patterns of relating, anxiety, inclusion-exclusion, and transformation of patterns of conversation.
But what does this mean for me? For some time now I have come to construct myself as a ‘collaborative explorer-activist working for intersubjective improvement in the quality of life on planet earth‘. How do I decide whether I should frame my work in the Stacey camp or whether I should frame it in the Heron and Reason camp? Perhaps this is a silly question and I should frame it in neither camp but rather dance about picking the little pearls of wisdom, the insightful conceptual, theoretical and practical lenses that shine new light on the situations that I will find myself facing. I must say that I am particularly taken by the idea of seeing all my interactions – in both formal and informal spaces – as holding the potential for me to both understand the patterns that I am producing and help others understand the patterns that they are producing… and then using this as a means of disrupting dysfunctional patterns; of acting into being new and emancipatory patterns of interbeing.
