Participation action research - A key to improved knowledge of management

Only by actively taking part inside ongoing processes in organisations for most of the time and occasionally moving out of the system to view it from a distance, and also to compare it with other systems and processes, can the optimal situation arise for a deeper understanding of the complexity of management and teamwork. This view of study and research is the basic principle of Participation (PAR), demanding that researchers act simultaneously as researchers and entrepreneurs, project leaders or team members. PAR is an extension of Action Research, which has mainly been used in social studies during the second part of the 20th century. In this article it is shown (for the first time?) that action research has a strong scientific support in modem science from quantum physics and chaos/complexity theory while in many ways it contradicts the classical (Newtonian) view of how 'good' science should be performed. In this paper a model is shown of how PAR can be used to combine industrial work with university resources in a fruitful way so that scientific findings can also be useful findings for practitioners. Our tests have shown that PAR has revealed important information on change management, project management, innovation management, and the development of (new) user-friendly products. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.