Page 115 - Crossing Cultural Boundaries - Cees den Teuling

Research Group, established as a spin-off in the Department of Sociology of the Russian Kazan Federal University.
3.2 Methodological approach
3.2.1 Action Research
The Underlying methodology of this thesis is partly based on Action Research, as introduced by Lewin (1946), according to whom it is an approach toward social research which combined generation of theory, changing a social system through the researcher acting on or in that social system.
The purpose of all researches, including AR, is the creation of new knowledge, followed by the validation of the claims by testing and concluded by the development/generation of a new theory. This research is focused on for-profit organisations in the Russian Federation, operating both in business-to-consumer and in business-to-business markets, mainly on the level of small and medium size enterprises (SME). The selection criterion is the involvement of the organisations as knowledge recipient in one or multiple advisory processes, involving Western consultants, in the recent decade. The assumption was that implementation of the AR framework for research would be beneficiary for both the organisations (research subject) and the researchers and would add substantial new insights to managerial practice and the “body of knowledge” (McKernan & Masters, 1995).
Basics of the AR were proposed for implementation in industrial organisations by Revans (1971) more than 45 years ago in the publication “Developing Effective Managers: A new Approach to Business Education”, which has been accepted as a “contribution to a new Business Education”. The author proposed a systemic structure of Action Research, in which managers were acting as temporary students, conducting research with their employer’s or other organisations. In the meantime, esteemed authors such as Kemmis, McTaggart and Nixon (2013), Zuber-Skerritt (2001), Holter and Schwartz-Barcott (1993) make references to the psychologist Lewin (1946) as the scientist who implemented action research in his studies as a novelty. In the meantime, a number of social reformists, such as Collier (1945), Lipitt and Raske (1946) used AR prior to Lewin. According to Kemmis et al. (2013), Lewin (1946) developed a theory of AR, in which it is defined as “proceeding in a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of planning, action and the evaluation of the result of action” (Lewin, 1946, pp. 34-46.). He turned his Action Research (AR) theory construction into a method of acceptable
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