Power and contexts – some societal conditions for participatory projects: Clashes between economic-management and pedagogic-social Discourses

Abstract

Purpose - The arbitrary and important delimitationWe have carried through many organisational development projects as consultants and action researchers within private and public organisations in Denmark since the 1980s. They have all been based on a hope; a hope of creating something which is better; a hope of fulfilling this achievement in co-operation with our partners in the organisation; a hope of co-creating practical, methodological, and theoretical improvements (Kristiansen & Bloch-Poulsen, 2010, 2011,2012, 2013a, 2013b).Since the beginning of this millennium, increasingly our attention has being directed to the contexts, i.e., the various conditions in and under which the action research (AR) processes take place and the various directly and indirectly implied stakeholders. In this article, we distinguish between three kinds of interconnected contexts: The process context, i.e., the immediate stakeholders and power balances in the AR process; the organisational context, and the societal context. In many cases, these contexts seem to impede or even obstruct the realisation of hope.This was the case, too, in an AR project that we carried through with a Social and Healthcare College in Denmark 2012-2013. The article describes co-operation with a team of teachers, the SSH-team, educating Social and Healthcare Helpers (see p.4). Based on our agreement with the team, the participants have approved all quotations and have been given new names.The article has three inter-connected purposes: a general, a specific and a forward-looking/action oriented:The general purpose is to show how mapping and delimitation of contexts are critical in an organisational AR project: Who are the stakeholders in addition to the immediately involved partners in the organisation? Whom would it be relevant to involve besides the field that we have to delineate as our context (Bums, 2007, 2012)? We distinguish between the chosen context and chosen partners on one hand, and the additional contexts and stakeholders. We use the word 'chosen' to underline that it is always arbitrary what you initially delineate as your field of inquiry: like Bateson's (1972) point of view about the arbitrariness of punctuation. In our case, that delimitation turned out to become fatal.The specific purpose is to show how, during the project, our attention was drawn to a power struggle between two Discourses: a pedagogic-social Discourse voiced by the SSH-team and by the action researchers versus an economic-managerial Discourse voiced by a couple of municipal managers. The article describes clashes between these Discourses. They are demonstrated in different ways of understanding a Social and Healthcare College and its students, the relation between theory and practice, and between knowledge and knowledge production. Thus, the two discourses deal with fundamentally different views of colleges, students, knowledge production, interaction between theory and practice, co-operation, and participation. As mentioned, we interpret these clashes between the two Discourses as a power struggle. It entailed that during one year, the SSH team had used its energy on an AR project in vain trying to improve the relation between theory and practice. As action researchers, we did not become aware of the strength and the full extent of the economic-managerial Discourse before we interviewed the municipal managers and listened to the tapes from all the meetings in the project.The forward-looking/action oriented purpose is thus to show that it is not only important to map the possible contexts and stakeholders. In relation to this mapping, context inquiring dialogues are necessary, too (Kristiansen, 2013). In these dialogues all stakeholders, including action researchers, cooperatively inquire into the possibilities and barriers for the AR project. This dialogic inquiry might result in a new project design involving new partners or it might result in a shared recognition that the project is not practicable at all. …