Peter Reason and Hilary Bradbury (Eds)
Sage Publications 2001
xlii+468 pp
Review by Chris Clarke (Visiting Professor, University of Southampton)

(An edited version of a review in Network: the Scientific and Medical Network Review)

The range of topics in this book probably touches most readers. Although Action Research (research that is embedded in human action/activity rather than keeping at a distance) has developed in Social Science, the issues raised involve the nature of science, that status of "knowledge", the relation between science and spiritual values, the relation between objective and subjective knowings ... a whole gamut of concerns. In this massively comprehensive work (which, I must admit, I have still not read in full), this range is surveyed in authoritative detail by 61 authors in 45 closely argued chapters; so here I can only pick out a few highlights.

Many different perspectives are given on the nature of "knowing". One is the stages of knowing of Reason and Heron, progressing through experiential, aesthetic, propositional and practical forms (p 179). Others that I found particularly interesting were the discussions of Habermas’ threefold division of knowing into the objective, moral/social, and subjective (Peter Park, p 84), raising for me interesting comparisons with three of Wilber’s quadrants. But perhaps the dominant critique of the nature of knowing centred around what June Boyce-Tillman (in her book The Wounds that Sing) calls "subjugated ways of knowing", a classification based on the relation of knowing to the power-status of groups in society.

To understand this, one must note (as is demonstrated in chapter after chapter) that the practice of science, as a human activity, is inextricably bound up with the politics of power.This holds from high energy physics (who is it that prioritises expenditure on experiments whose cost dwarfs the GNP of half of Africa?) to biology, where all the basic questions are now dictated by the power of the biotechnology industry, through a medicine that ignores the human personality, to economic and social research designed to maintain structures of oppression. And in the politics of power, knowledge is the most powerful instrument ¾ a thesis documented academically in a meticulous survey by John Gaventa and Andrea Cornwall. Knowledge is in practice always acquired by particular people, for a particular purpose, presented in a particular way. A central realisation in the development of the subject was the notion that knowledge is not a neutral commodity, to be traded in self-contained packages; but rather, the nature of knowledge depends on the power structures within which it emerges. Knowledge that is produced by priviledged classes is in practice often unusable by the underprivileged classes. Thus.Orlando Fals Borda, one of the founding workers in the field, describes his growing realisation that "If we could discover a way to bring about a convergence of popular thought and acdemic science, we could gain both a more complete and a more applicable knowledge - especially by and for the underpriviledged classes which were in need of scientific support." (p 28) Rather than being a commodity, knowledge is a process; its acquisition is itelf socially and personally empowering "'Prior to [this work] our staff had done research on chemicals and their health effects for people and given them the results ...' When people learned to do their own research, they began to realise that experts are not the objective, unbiased, disinterested purveyors of truth." (Helen M Lewis, p 361, quoting J Merrifield)

A second theme concerns the way in which the personal interacted with the social and the scientific, involving "first-person", "second-person" and "third-person" narratives. Under these categories, William Torbert documented the personal discipline needed for the inquirer to develop his/her own depth of awareness, the bringing of this into speaking and listening ("speaking is action" - p 254), and finally the interweaving of these perspectives when working with a group of people who are coming to understand their situation. A less categorised (but for me more convincing) perspective was brought from the accounts of "attentional disciplines" by Judi Marshall (p 433) involving "engaging inner and outer arcs of attention and ... moving between these". This interplay of persons acquired particular significance when it involved crossing different cultural perspectives, breaking out of the Western dominance that has tended to define the natures of "knowledge" and "science". Timothy Pyrch and Maria Teresa Castillo powerfully described (p 379) difficulty of hearing local or indigenous voices which speak to "our hidden intuitive, metaphoric and spiritual qualities still devalued by the gatekeepers of official and expert knowledge" (p 379) The art of respectfully listening to these voices is hard because "our academic training has tended to fragment sense from soul" Yet if we are to reach for a science that has fully human validity, rather than being bound to a particular culture (that stemming from Northern Europe), we must cross these ethnic boundaries.

Many articles bring to the light of day terms that I have heard bandied confusingly about for decades. "System theory", for instance, is traced by Robert Flood through a progression in which the term’s meaning almost reverses, from early mechanistic applications in organisational theory, to its metamorphosis into "Complexity theory" at the hands of Waldrop and others, which introduces an explicitly spiritual dimension into the study of human experience. Complexity theory in this sense (not to be confused with the related uses in computer science and mathematical physics) aims at breaking out of a reductionism that "has in our minds fragmented the world, our existence and our thoughts about how we might manage ourselves. The richness and mystique of life and living is deflated to a mental model …" (p 142)

Vast though the scope of this book is, there are some areas where the coverage could be greater. While spirituality appears often, the explicitly transpersonal dimension is represented in full only in the article by John Heron. And, though it was implicit in the work of Torbert and others, I missed (perhaps overlooked) any explicit discussion of the nature of "Action" itself. What is it? What is the relation between action and non-action, between knowledge and action, between action and passion? In the beginning, is there the "act" (as for Goethe’s Faust), the Word, or the Sound? However, practically all the rest of human life is here, so purchasers will be well rewarded.