Action Learning for Social Action

Taking Part in Social Change

Mike Pedler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000286502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

This book is about action learning in the service of social action and social change. The contributors are all engaged in developing new approaches to the wicked problems found in the world today, including the climate emergency, the circular economy, food poverty and insecurity, homelessness, disadvantage, active citizenship, social entrepreneurialism, and the learning of young women abducted by Boko Haram. They reflect a great diversity of settings in South Africa, Australia, Canada, Nigeria, Mozambique, Hungary, Poland and the UK.

At this time of global crisis rapid technological and social developments sit side by side with apparently impossible challenges needing urgent action. In the Global South, conflicts, terrorism and climatic changes have forced millions of people to abandon their homes and to migrate in search of food and safety. In the Global North, neo-liberal and market-based policies have pursued deregulation, privatisation and the shrinking of the state with consequent increases in homelessness, poverty and ill-health.

Action learning was devised to help people work together in challenging situations to bring about changes from the bottom–up. The people in these stories and cases are not passively awaiting brighter futures but are acting together to create a better world for themselves. They are taking back control in local community regeneration schemes, local energy and housing projects, setting up co-working spaces and inventing new ways of doing business and learning new ways to inhabit the earth. They demonstrate a confidence in an action learning idea that is alive and evolving. The chapters in this book were first published in the journal Action Learning: Research and Practice.

On social action^*

Mike Pedler

* Thanks to Chris Blantern, Tom Bourner, John Edmonstone & Jeff Gold for their comments and conversations.

Introduction

The theme for this Special Issue arose from a session at the 2018 Action Learning Conference, where Sonja Antell and Ruth Cook talked about their projects focused on urgent social issues such as poverty, homelessness and food insecurity. It was reminiscent of Revans’ characterisation of action learning as Helping Each Other to Help the Helpless (1982, 457–492).

Revans’ ambition extended well beyond management education to the improvement of the organisations and systems that we depend on and ultimately the societies in which we live. The session came alive for me because of the focus upon social improvement, upon, if you wish, the desire to make the world a better place. Fittingly, the conference was being held in Liverpool, in the world’s 5th richest nation, where monuments to industry, empire and slavery mingle with the more recent signs of neglect and decay including homeless people on the streets.

Much of what is called action learning today is for personal and career development rather than for organisational and social improvement. This perhaps reflects an era infused by the individualistic ethos of market fundamentalism and so-called neo-liberalism (Edmonstone 2019), where the social takes a back seat to the quest for personal success.

What is social action?

There are two questions here: what do we mean by action in action learning? And, building on that, what do we mean by social action? Listening to Ruth & Sonja speak In Liverpool, it seemed obvious to me that this was social action – action to help those who suffered the deprivations of poverty or homelessness, but also to benefit the wider society. I put out the call for papers and, to judge by the enthusiastic response, seemed to catch a wave. Since then, I have been thinking more about the notion of social action, with the result that the picture has become richer and more complex, but as ever, not necessarily clearer! The following section is a summary of this thinking, to which some close colleagues made notable contributions.

Action

Action is the first requirement for action learning: it is the origin of significant learning and the outcome point of that learning. The inseparability of action and learning is emblematic, as in Revans’ epigrams: ‘Learning is cradled in the task’ and ‘Learning involves doing’ (2011, 3–5); a view also shared with other ‘action modalities’ (Raelin 2009) concerned with ‘actionable knowledge’ (Argyris 1993). Action can be defined as ‘someone’s doing something intentionally’, where someone is an agent or one having agency, that is, the power to act, and the something is an event, brought about by the agent’s intent (Honderich 1995: p4/5). But such definitions are slippery and rarely comprehensive. So for example, a person can be said to have done something even when doing nothing, whilst another can say that their most profound act is to change their thinking.

In editing these papers about action learning in the service of social improvement, I have urged contributors to make plain the social impact of their work. but this is not always so straightforward where outcomes might include people not doing things that they might otherwise have done or someone having a radical, but invisible thought. And yet, unlearning something, especially when it is a habit that has become dysfunctional, maybe far more effective than trying more new strategies; a transformative change of heart more powerful in its effects than any number of variations on existing themes.

But what distinguishes such an ‘action’ from ‘inaction’ (Vince 2008)? This is hard to do if it remains private to the person and it would also not meet the action learning test. However profound an internal change of heart or mind, it is not an action in these terms unless it is shared with at least one other person. Revans liked to quote the Buddha to stress our moral responsibility in this respect:

It is better to do a little good than to write difficult books. The perfect man is nothing is he does not diffuse benefits on others, if he does not console the lonely. The way of salvation is open to all, but know that a man deceives himself if he thinks he can escape his conscience by taking refuge in a monastery. (Revans 2011, xiii)

Free will?

Rather like nature/nurture discussion in human development, there is a long-standing debate in the social sciences as to whether agency or structure is the most significant influence on human behaviour. In this argument, and roughly speaking, agency is the capacity of individuals to make free choices, whilst structure includes all the constraining economic, organisational and social arrangements including cultural factors such as customs, norms, ideologies and languages.¹

In the social sciences, social constructionism has greatly influenced how we understand the idea of action. From this perspective, how we perceive reality depends on shared assumptions so that many of the things we take for granted and believe to be ‘true’ are actually constructed in human interaction. To illustrate this point, my colleague Chris Blantern likes to quote Richard Rorty’s epigram that even ‘Nature has no name for itself’. On the other hand, it is clear that people can sometimes rise above structural constraints to resist and deny what is held to be common sense and true. Alongside many mundane examples, Victor Frankl’s (1958) account of how he managed to make sense of, and even transcend, the hellish context of the concentration camp, inspired a generation of humanistic psychologists.

We do not live as atomised individuals, but in communities and societies. As social beings, we are both unfree and free. As persons subject to processes of acculturation and socialisation, and the internalisation of aspects of existing institutional frameworks and current systems of beliefs, ideas and values, we are not entirely free to create the world as we might want it. However, socialisation processes can be resisted and challenged; cultures and institutions are always being questioned and internally contested, with alternative ideas and voices existing alongside the orthodoxies. So we are unfree because we are inevitably constituted by these acculturation processes, creatures of our times; but also free because old institutions and social paradigms can be broken and new ones created. For us, social beings action learning offers a means of doing this work.

Social action

Whilst action learning assumes the possibility of personal agency, and the ability of the learner to encourage themselves and their fellow set members into action, it also holds that both action and learning are social processes. In action learning, participants learn with and from each other and act outside the set with other people in their organisations and communities. Without this involvement of other people, the notion of action hardly makes any sense, and thus all action is social action. In arriving at this view, Revans drew on the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray (1961), who forges a position bridging the poles of the structure/agency debate

Macmurray’s achievement was in challenging Kant’s idea of the Self as primarily a thinker or knower (an ‘egocentric position implying ‘extreme logical individualism’ 1961, Vol. 1; xvii). Instead, he asserts the prior place of action before thought: ‘action is ontologically prior, knowledge arises within action’ (1961, Vol. 1, xvi). This is a revolutionary shift which turns Descartes’ view of the thinking Self on its head and puts in its place the acting Self: ‘I do, therefore I am’. However, Macmurray goes on to argue, the very notion of Self implies an Other and we are always ‘persons in relation’: ‘We exist only as agents, and in our existence, we are parts of the world … .and … in action the Self and the Other form a unity’ (1961, Vol. 1, 220). Because there is no atomistic individual self unrelated to other people, action can only take place between persons and in the interpersonal world; so, it is not so much ‘I do, therefore I am’ as ‘We do, therefore we are’.

Action in the world

Making plain the social impact of action learning may be difficult where individuals are engaged in invisible shifts or unlearning. but it can also be difficult because action learning happens in the contexts of organisations, communities and other social entities. Revans was very conscious of the need to extend the reach of action learning ‘outwards from set to learning community’ (2011, 71). He proposes an array of supporting structures to amplify the work of the set (‘the cutting edge of every action learning programme’ 2011, 7) including sponsors, clients, client groups and supporting assemblies as part of ‘the multiplier effect’ (2011, 12). These were the means to bring about the organisational and social transformations to which he aspired. Revans’ ‘general theory of human action … a science of praxeology.’ (1971, 58; 33–67) consists of three systems or spheres: those of personal action and learning, specific project development and the wider whole system of organisations in their environments. Although such elaborate structures are rarely present in action learning programmes these days, the multiplier is visible in a number of these papers, as where Cathy Sharp, for example, talks about the ‘unknowable number of different people’ taking part in leadership processes (Sharp: 2).

For action learning to be deployed helpfully in social renewal and improvement, a whole systems perspective becomes essential for tackling those knotty issues where there are no simple solutions and where responses require collaboration from several agencies acting together. When I first heard Revans speak in 1976, he told us that action learning was a very simple idea, not new, but enshrined in ancient wisdom. It made sense to me, I got it, then and there. but the experience of trying to use it was anything but simple. For a start, nothing was ever incontestably ‘successful’. We ran projects and they sometimes worked and they sometimes didn’t; or some people were successful to a degree, whilst others showed little progress. Simple cause and effect are hard to trace in the dense networks of big systems and organisations; accidental ironies and unintended consequences could be counted on and successful outcomes, insofar as we could find proof of these, were too removed to be reasonably be tracked back to their origins.

In the face of these sorts of dilemmas, contradictions and intractable problems, action learning scholars have paid a good deal of attention to the idea of Critical Action Learning (CAL) (e.g. Edmonstone 2019; Pedler and Hsu 2014; Rigg and Trehan 2004; Trehan 2011; Vince 2004, 2008, 2012). CAL is a post-Revans response to the convoluted and political nature of action in complex systems of organisation. In dealing with such conundrums, unlearning may be as important as any new learning because things are as they are because of the way we have thought about and dealt with them in the past. Revans was aware of this, warning constantly of the ‘idolisation of the past’ (2011, 41–50), and even proposing, in a whimsical moment, new professorships ‘to tell us not how to acquire knowledge but how to forget it’ (1982, 527).

So, we are actors not just in personal relations but in complex systems of organising, where particular actions form part of interactions and ramifications far beyond any individual’s reach and awareness. These forms of daily interaction. or micro-organisational acts. also go to make up the character of the organisation: for example, via hierarchical acts or by generative and collaborative actions, by democratic or controlling ones, including or excluding practices and so on. Many or most of these daily acts are habitual and thoughtless, but this is the ‘life-world’ that both generates actions and conditions them. Taken collectively these daily acts sediment into the structural, informing identities, local cultures, habits of taboo and deference and of how power is created, used and abused. This is also where action learning can sometimes help through the questioning and awareness raising processes that can produce changes of heart and mind where the near-invisible processes of change can begin.

Social justice

What fired me up in Liverpool was not the excitement of trying to make sense of ‘social action’ (although I have enjoyed this) but because these projects aimed to help improve actual people’s lives in the places where they lived. During our email conversations, Tom Bourner asked me whether continuing to explore the possible meanings of social action was producing anything useful? As he observed, more than 2000 years after Plato defined knowledge as justified true belief, philosophers are still debating its meaning. At the same time, few of us would deny that there has been a huge increase in useful hum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 On social action
• 2 Practising Change Together - Where nothing is clear, and everything keeps changing
• 3 Participatory action research as political education
• 4 The transformative potential of action learning in community-based research for social action
• 5 Action learning & Action research to alleviate Poverty
• 6 Carbon management and community-based action learning: a theory to work experience
• 7 Using Participatory Action Learning to Empower the Active Citizenship of Young People
• 8 Social Action Learning: Applicability to Comrades in Adversity in Nigeria
• 9 Action Learning in the Service of Food Security and Poverty Alleviation in Mozambique
• 10 Developing the Circular Economy in Tasmania
• 11 Exploring the challenges of system leadership in the voluntary and community sector
• 12 Using action learning to tackle food insecurity in Scotland
• 13 Developing empowered and connected leaders in the social sector: the Rank Foundation’s engagement with Action Learning
• 14 DIAL: the rise of cafe-based, drop-in action learning
• Index