Publishing action research

Action research has a long history in the field of management and organisation studies. Since Lewin’s original work to develop the processes of action research, the approach has been applied to a wide variety of research problems and in a host of different organisational contexts. Furthermore, a range of variants of action research has developed, including action science, action learning, participatory action research and many others. In more recent years, there have been calls for greater use of action-oriented research approaches to help increase the relevance of management research to the community of practising managers. However, despite these developments, action researchers still face significant challenges in publishing their research. This paper undertakes an empirical review of the volume of research published in action research as compared to other research methods. If the management research community aims to achieve a macro-level change by adopting more action-oriented research, this paper explores the question “what micro-level changes can action researchers make to effect this desired macro-level change?