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Building grounded theory in action research through the interplay of subjective ontology and objective epistemology
Latha Poonamallee Action Research 2009 7: 69 DOI: 10.1177/1476750308099598 The online version of this article can be found at: http://arj.sagepub.com/content/7/1/69

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Action Research
Volume 7(1): 6983 Copyright 2009 SAGE Publications Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC www.sagepublications.com DOI: 10.1177/1476750308099598

ARTICLE

Building grounded theory in action research through the interplay of subjective ontology and objective epistemology
Latha Poonamallee Michigan Technological University, USA

ABSTRACT In this article, I contribute to the discourse on building theory within the context of action research. Specifically, drawing on advaita (non-dualism) philosophy from Hinduism, I describe a holistic framework which views life as holistic, that is, comprising both subjective and objective views of reality and thus promoting interplay between ontological subjectivity and epistemological objectivity. I illustrate with examples, how anchored in a holistic paradigm, I used principles of constant comparison in developing the theoretical category of sacredness in its various dimensions. I also describe two dimensions that characterized this process: researcher as insider-outsider and researchers affirmations and ambivalences.

KEY WORDS

action research change paradigms postcolonialism theory

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Introduction
Theory can be a powerful resource for generating insight, understanding, and action (Kemmis, 2001) by bringing order to complex phenomena (Bradbury & Reason, 2001). However, partly due to action researchers preoccupation with developing local theories for practical problem solving, developing transferable theory is an under-focused area in action research (Eden & Huxham, 1996). Another factor is assumptions about ontology and epistemology. Because if reality is thought to be purely subjective, knowledge created about such reality will have to be subjective too and cannot be valid; hence, the interest in creating thick descriptions (Deetz, 1996) with less attention to theory building. For example, there are many reasons why grounded theory (GT) method is a good fit for theory generation in action research (Eden & Huxham, 1996). But GTs requirements of objectivity and tabula rasa induction are difficult to reconcile with action researchers deep engagement with the phenomenon. In this article, I join a small but growing discourse in social sciences that denies the subject-object split (Alvesson & Skoldberg, 2001; Benefiel, 2005; Bhaskar, 1978; Ladkin, 2005) by offering an alternate paradigm based on advaita (non-dualism), a Hindu philosophy. This philosophy views life as holistic, that is, comprising both subjective and objective views of reality because both views are manifestations of the ultimate reality which is non dualistic. I propose that anchored in this holistic paradigm, self-reflexivity can overcome the danger of becoming self-indulgent and self-referential (Marshall, 2001) and can help make objective sense of subjective experience. I describe how grounded in this holistic paradigm, I developed theoretical categories in action research by using the constant comparative techniques from grounded theory method (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) in combination with rigorous self-reflexivity. My field study of a social change movement in India provides the context for this discussion. Theoretically, my study was an exploratory investigation of organizing for radical social change through collective action that resulted in an emerging theory of change. As an action researcher, I also wanted to crystallize my learning from the process of inquiry itself (Argyris, 1982) and this article is the result: my research narrative that is anchored in the community narrative, a story within a story and a theory within a theory. For purposes of this article, I went back to my original data, analysis and personal notes, and analyzed all of them using the constant comparative approach (Glaser & Strauss, 1969) and developed theoretical categories that characterized my inquiry process. They were researchers location as an insider-outsider, researcher affirmation and ambivalence that resulted in interplay between ontological subjectivity and epistemological objectivity. First, I describe the holistic paradigm of advaita philosophy and then, I offer a brief synopsis of the study and the community story.

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Holistic paradigm: An advaitic view of the world

In organizational analysis, no other paradigmatic grid has gained the almost hegemonic capacity as that of Burrell and Morgan (Deetz, 1996). One of the axes in this grid is ontology, that is, nature of reality. This pertains to the question of whether the reality to be investigated is external to the individual or the product of individual consciousness. Burrell and Morgan (1979) term it the subjective objective divide. According to them, ones view of the nature of reality informs their view of the nature of knowledge. The question is whether knowledge is hard, real, and capable of being transmitted in a tangible form or if it is of a softer, more subjective, spiritual or even transcendental kind, based on experience and insight of unique and essentially personal nature. Moreover, in this framework a synthesis is not possible because in their pure forms, they are contradictory and mutually exclusive. In this article, I offer an alternative paradigm which views life as holistic, that is, comprising both subjective and objective views of reality. This paradigm is grounded in the advaita (non-dualistic) view of reality. Roots of this philosophy go back millennia to Vedas and Upanishads and I draw on the foundational work done by Dr S. Radhakrishnan an Indian philosopher and statesman, Swami Vivekananda (1907) a 19th-century Indian spiritual leader/activist-reformer, and Gandhi whose life itself was an experiment in Advaita philosophy (Saravanamuthu, 2006). In a sense, all of them were action researchers who engaged with both practice and theory of advaita. Most of the discussion about ontology in social sciences is derived from Western philosophical traditions grounded in incommensurable dualities: an approach to God that separates divinity from the human, humanist philosophy that separates human beings from the rest of the universe, and modern science that separates personal experience from facts or knowledge (Radhakrishnan, 1999). But the Advaita philosophy rests on assumptions of non-dualism. In this framework, objective and existential realities are not metaphysical contraries. For advaitic thinkers, both the objective world or empirical being (vyavaharika satta) and illusory or subjective experience (pratibhasika satta) exist. Nature (swabhava) is the object of a subject the underlying principle of things. We need one to understand and experience the other. While realization of nature (object) of a phenomenon (subject) is a fact, a theory of reality is an inference. Both the subjective and objective realities are valid expressions of the ultimate because, sadspadam sarvam sarvatra everything everywhere is based on ultimate reality and all knowledge is a struggle to know the ultimate reality. To know or realize the ultimate is the goal of an advaiti (non-dualist). It is in this knowledge (vidya) lies ananda (bliss) which integrates existence, consciousness, and intuition. It lies beyond the scope of what is usually considered knowledge but paradoxically it is knowledge that can transport one there. Knowledge in this framework is not just limited to texts. It integrates multiple

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ways of knowing, action, experience, contemplation and sense making. However, rationality or objective thought is an important dimension. Radhakrishnan (1999: 25) writes, to be spiritual is not to reject reason but to go beyond. It is to think so hard that thinking becomes knowing or viewing. Conventional dualistic ontology denies a subject the capacity for objective reflection. But advaita epistemology is based on the belief that a subject can view itself as an object and still continue to be an actor and subject. An advaitis quest for knowledge is an effort toward knowing ultimate reality through a relation between subject and object. This is done through a witnessing of subject and object, thus freeing oneself of both purely subjective and objective realities through knowing both.

Research context
Community narrative: A synopsis
This case is located in Alwar district in Rajasthan state, India. Twenty years ago, Rajendra Singh the founder of Tarun Bharat Sangh (TBS), a non-governmental organization triggered an environmental rejuvenation of the area, which in turn led to economic and social rejuvenation. In 1983, he arrived in Bheekampura Kishori, a tiny village in the region, driven by an internal call to do something for the society. During those decades, due to severe drought conditions, distress migration was rampant in the area and poverty stark. Advised by a local village elder, Rajendra Singh set out to revive an old water harvesting structure in the village. Inspired by this and the success thereof, this movement of ecological reclamation spread to over 2000 villages. These villages also formed village committees to manage their natural resources including water, forest and animals. Such large-scale water conservation has also led to the rejuvenation of local rivers then defunct and the community rallied around to form a River Parliament to protect and manage this newfound resource. This ecological emancipation, brought in through community involvement, ushered in changes because availability of water freed womens time and they began to get involved in income generation activities and this led to schools being formed and the children of the area going to school. They have even started a Water University to share their knowledge and experience with others.

Research topic: A brief background

This study was conducted during the early stages of my doctoral program in a department well known for action research engagement in social change across the world. At that stage, I had not yet theoretically positioned my work, but I had a keen interest in social change processes, especially in postcolonial and post-

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developmental communities. My initial survey of literature of the discourses of modernity, postmodernity and development helped me define my research questions. For instance, even in my early proposal for this study, I wrote:
The relevance of this site also stems from the urgent need to learn from communities that have managed to reverse the ravages of Development which has left millions behind. Despite the rhetoric, traditional mainstream development has not been successful in providing equal access to all the people and instead has led to the creation of new islands of poverty. As Sachs (1992) says, at a time when development has evidently failed as a socioeconomic behavior, it has become of paramount importance to liberate ourselves from its dominion over our minds and to discover how a few others have fashioned their lives through alternate social realities. Scholars like Appadurai (2000) and Esteva and Prakash (2000) write about new emergent social forms, creating or reinventing fresh intellectual and institutional frameworks that go beyond the premises and promises of modernity. Studying these communities might give us new ways to understand and change organizations.

My literature review also revealed that my work would add value by bringing in an organizational lens traditionally viewed through developmental or macroeconomic perspectives. It would also go a step toward addressing the ethnocentric imbalance of our field (Fals-Borda & Mora-Osejo, 2003; Whiteman & Cooper, 2000). I selected this particular case from a shortlist of 30 different community development efforts and/or leaders because given this regions high illiteracy, poverty, prevalence of child marriage and distance from the mainstream economy that was fueling the economic engine in the urban areas, their sustained accomplishment (over 20 years) in ecological, social, and cultural transformation was dramatic. Moreover, coming from a water starved community myself, this story had personal appeal. Finally, I also believed that I could learn from this community about how the powerless claim the power to change their worlds as well as gain control over their commons.

Action research in the holistic paradigm

From the point of view of conventional dualistic ontology, AR appears to be subject to subjectivity owing to its stance on researcher being an actor. In this article, I propose that when anchored in a holistic ontology, in which a subject is believed to have the ability to witness herself and her processes objectively, there is potential for creative interplay between the ontological subjectivity and epistemological objectivity. The key dimensions that characterize this process are: researcher as an insider-outsider and researchers affirmations and ambivalences.

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Researcher as insider-outsider
By researcher as insider-outsider, I mean that a researcher simultaneously being an insider and an outsider in relation to the phenomenon that he or she is engaging with. As an insider-outsider, not only can one actively engage in the phenomenon, one can also objectively view their own process of engagement. I was an insider as an actor and subject engaging in the phenomenon and an outsider observing the phenomenon and my engagement. My first visit was in the summer of 2001 and I have gone back multiple times for extended periods of time afterwards thus forging personal relationships with many members of the community. I was also demographically an insider-outsider. Having been raised in India, I shared certain cultural understandings (language, social practice like caste system) with this community. However, being an urbanite, I had no insight into the everyday life of this rural, agrarian community. Being an insider and outsider simultaneously helped me explore this world with its contradictions and allow my relationship with the community grow over time.

Researchers sense-making: Affirmations and ambivalences

Like ethnographers, action researchers need to juxtapose their assumptions and practices with those of the foreign culture (Schulze, 2000). Being an insideroutsider simultaneously allows the researcher to co-hold the subjective and the objective and the way the researcher can make sense of the data. In her relationship with the data and her experience with the system, sometimes her assumptions might get affirmed while there may be times when her ambivalences are aroused. I found that some of my experience with the community and the data that I collected affirmed my assumptions while some other experiences and data highlighted my own ambivalences and paying attention to both was helpful for generating insight.

Development of theoretical categories: An example

I describe how I developed the primary theoretical category, the sacred and its various dimensions through an objective sense-making process of subjective experience, various types of data, and theory. Core of the sacred My background and training in a department that is steeped in the traditions of Appreciative Inquiry (Cooperrider & Srivastva, 1987) made me sensitive to affirmative assumptions, a fundamental dimension that emerged as a foundational block in my sense-making. For example, this was one of the first excerpts that coded under affirmative assumptions:

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When I heard that there was a time when the neighboring village, Brahmanvas, had a market for grains, it occurred to me that if this district was poor for centuries, there wouldnt have been a market for grains. So, this place must have been prosperous at some point of time and that is why there was a market for grains here . . . they were built from resources in this region. So I started thinking about that world, what times were they, what kind of world was that, what can we learn from those times?

Rajendra Singh, while looking at a poverty stricken community in despair, did not assume that this community had nothing to offer or help themselves. But instead, he started off with a positive, affirmative assumption that there is evidence in this in community of past glory and that he needs to uncover their wisdom from decades or centuries of dust from colonial influence. When I began to code more transcripts, I discovered that this affirmative assumption is not restricted to people but extended to all sentient beings, cherishing and worshipping trees, animals, birds and all the elemental forces. Over and over, I heard a note of acceptance, love and respect for all sentient beings. In my personal journal, I wrote:
I keep seeing the spiritual dimension of these people, the use of we, common for vision for the group, no special requirement for self, love, sustenance economy, but no need to grow and expand ones wealth and riches beyond water, happiness for all . . . no quest for individual . . . concern for environment, animals around.

Affirmative assumptions are part of my training and makeup, but as an urbanite trained in business and management, so is cost-benefit analysis based on utilitarian rationality. Therefore, even while I saw that with such affirmative assumptions, there is a willingness to accept and nourish the other with love; a willingness to invest emotions, energies and resources for the welfare of their community, I also saw a defiance of costbenefit rationality which I found incredible. I struggled to make sense of and articulate this component of their socioecological relational ethic which values community wellbeing as wealth. I was also conscious of my own ambivalent relationship with technology. I believed that being choiceful about use of technology helps one lead a more environment-friendly life, but I am also cognizant of the role of technology in my life. During every visit, it took me a while to adjust to the technological and material limitations of this community, because I had to relearn to live without the modern conveniences of electricity, running water, and working telephone. My visits were at least a few weeks long, so it was not a camping adventure but a serious lifestyle change. I have also wondered if it would be possible for me to choose it as a permanent lifestyle. I continue to reflect on and explore this ambivalence, which made me examine this communitys assumptions and definitions of progress and wealth in contrast to the ones that the modern populations hold. I share an excerpt from my personal journal that illustrates my struggle:
Life seems to be difficult to people there, no way of income except through lifestock, and gathering forest produce but they dont have the right to sell the dung. And also

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the question of standard of life. But As Suresh Bhai says these people dont think their lives are bad, it is me with my urban values, the values of an omnivore imposing my values on their lives and finding their below standards. So what are the standards. And whose standards?

Such comparative analysis between the data that I collected and my personal reactions helped me conceptualize that they have a different understanding of wealth. For them wealth is the well-being of the community which everyone I spoke to enunciated over and over again. Arjun Bhai, one of the locals tells me:
The world thinks that those who consume a lot, those who spend a lot, those who enjoy a lot, they are the developed ones. You may know that those who share a relationship of love with nature, those who have love in them, those who can nourish the others with love nurture the environment and community around them. For us, that is wealth.

Mindfulness through submission to the sacred I admire their sense of deep caring and sense of responsibility towards the entire ecosystem and even aspire to share their sense of togetherness that allows them to participate in a relational understanding of long-term benefits for all, without questioning about short-term individual share of the benefits. But I also continue to wrestle with this kind of subjugation of self to the community. In this community, collective well-being is predominant, but individual and family preferences are honored through a consensual process of decision-making in their village committees. They respect the right of people to dissent and have agreed that they will not begin a project till everyone is committed to it. There have been cases of certain villages taking over three to five years to come to a consensus. Moreover, I knew that ones sense of place is very much tied to ones caste and I didnt want to overlook serious social issues like caste system or womens involvement. I also asked questions about how they managed to overcome a seemingly insurmountable stratification to build an egalitarian system of decision-making. Like every part of rural India, the people in this region also follow strict caste rules. They marry within their own castes and their social status is reflective of their caste. They dont claim an unrealistic sense of harmony but have managed to find common ground in issues that matter to all of them. Submitting themselves to a larger cause of their village and its welfare as a whole, they have been able to work with each other without giving up their caste identities, they have learnt to acknowledge their differences and yet work together around them. From this reflection and analysis of data about how they made decisions in their village committees, I constructed category called mindfulness. I use the term mindfulness because these people live a mindful existence, mindful of their role, their community and the ecosystem in which they live.

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Sacred vision Longevity of this initiative fascinated me as an insider to change processes. As one of the villagers puts it, All this work happened little by little. From my previous experience as a change manager and a change consultant, I knew that most business organizations have a hard time sticking to their change agenda over time, especially when there is resource constraint. I wanted to know how this movement kept spreading through a distributed community of a couple of thousand villages, even through hard times like drought, government aggressions, large-scale urban migration and globalization. I found that these villages operating with very little material resources have an enormous reserve of resilience and patience to wait because their vision is rooted in faith, faith that they are doing the right thing, faith that they are responding to a call. They sustain their faith through a symbolic manipulation of their universe, which includes their vision, dreams, emotions and attachments. Rajendra Bhai talks about the vision for water.
I did not have the vision for water, the image of it, because I was born in a place which had plenty of water. When you live amidst plenty of water, you dont grasp the real character of water, you dont have the real vision for it. You dont grasp the sacred and holy nature of water, last night you heard the people from Haryana saying that water is sacred, they dont call the ponds Thalabs, they call them Tirth (place of pilgrimage). When it is seen as holy, its character is different, its science is different, it is not in words. I tried to learn how water becomes holy and sacred, when paani (water) becomes Tirth (place of holy pilgrimage), what is the vision behind making it so.

Attribution of sacredness to their vision allowed the people to wait in willingness while this story of transformation happened over 20 years and continues to move them because with a sense of the sacred, vision becomes a hard earned gift out of ones connection with the universe. Dailiness This category was a result of my reflection on my engagement with the temporal dimension of the community in combination with a life experience that came after I returned from my first data collection trip. During the first few days of my stay, there were moments when I felt frustrated that I was wasting my time when I was hanging out and not collecting formal data. For instance, one of my earlier journal entries reads, Though the whole day seemed to be wasted, the evening turned out to be pretty fruitful. However, my experience with the community enhanced considerably when I began to operate within their understanding of how time works, when I moved from an ambivalence to acceptance of their sense of time. At the same time, as a scholar I was trying to be self-reflexively aware of these changes in myself and learn from them. The following excerpt written after a few weeks of stay with this community illustrates the shift that I had made:

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I notice that I have even stopped dating my notes. Dates dont seem to matter here anyway. There is a sense of timelessness and one just can pass a whole lifetime here like this. Sitting outside under the bamboo tree on the wicker chair, reading, writing, listening to the tapes, just day dreaming, the feeling of warm air on my body, bees and beetles buzzing by, watching the bhai clean the floor, listening to the cows and birds, watching the peacocks glide by, drinking chai out of the matkas, the bell ringing from the mandir in the evening. Each of it is so unique and yet so part of the whole. The air seems to hum with life and boredom at the same time.

This also resembles the shift that Rajendara Singh talked about making in his own psyche; about how he had to unlearn a lot of stuff and learned to be part of the community. Moreover, during data analysis stage, my baby boy was born and I was wrapped up in the caretaking activities. As a first time mother, I was astounded by the amount of time I was spending on changing diapers, nursing my baby, putting him to sleep activities that I would have perhaps thought wasteful before I became a mother but now I felt that these activities were not only important but sacred because they were centered around taking care of a new life and building a nurturing emotional and physical relationship with my son. My personal, subjective experience helped me objectively understand my data on vision and long-term intergenerational commitment. My everyday life during this period helped me live, appreciate and understand the category of Dailiness I borrowed from Judy Long (1999). She uses this term to describe the never ending nature of womens lives revolving around everyday activities. I could see its relevance not just to a womans life but to the lives of all human beings, because most of our lives are full of everyday routine activities towards a larger end.

Discussion
The reification of the mutual paradigmatic incommensurability between subjective and objective ontological and epistemological positions has been particularly problematic for action researchers because an assumption of subjective ontology has meant that the validity of their theoretical claims is suspect. Action researchers (Baldwin, 2001; Bradbury & Reason, 2001; Ladkin, 2005) explicit in their concern with theorizing in action research have examined ways of balancing subjectivity and objectivity. Others have also argued for alternative paradigmatic conceptions like spiritually informed management theory (Steingard, 2005) or a transcendent epistemology of organization (Gustavsson, 2001) or Lonergans structures of knowing (Benefiel, 2005). My work joins this stream of conversation and adds value by articulating a holistic paradigmatic framework based on advaita (non-dualism) philosophy and demonstrating its use in theory generation with an example. To position this emerging discourse in existing paradigmatic understanding, I have developed a simple 2 x 2 matrix (Figure 1).

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Ontology

Subjective Subjective Epistemology Subjectivists German Idealists

Objective Critical Realists

Objective

This study

Objectivists Sociological Positivists

Figure 1 Paradigmatic discourses

One axis of this matrix is ontology subjective and objective. The second axis is the epistemology subjective and objective. In this framework, there is no assumption of mutual incommensurability between ontological and epistemological paradigms. The objectivist cell is the home of research shaped by assumptions of sociological positivism. This cell would then include radical structuralists and the functionalists from the Burrell and Morgan matrix regardless of their interest in sociology of change or regulation. The subjectivists shaped by German idealism and all research that is focused solely on consciousness falls in this cell and may include strands of interpretive research, radical humanism, and social constructionist approach. The third alternative, objective ontology and subjective epistemology is critical realism proposed by Bhaskar (1970). According to this school of thought, an entity is real if it can cause an effect. An entity may exist independent of our knowledge (objective reality) but our access to it is conceptually mediated (subjective epistemology). While critical realism broadens scientific thinking grounded in positivistic assumptions of objectivity by bringing in the idea of subjective mediation, and thus skepticism, it does not really advance new grounds for those bound by subjectivist assumptions. But, the fourth cell, that is, ontological subjectivity and epistemological objectivity reflects an emerging discourse. Scholars advocating attention on human consciousness (Steingard, 2005), use of subject as an instrument to produce transcendent or transformative knowledge (Gustavsson, 2001) and objectivity as the fruit of authentic subjectivity (Benefiel, 2005), are examples of this type of integration. Recent cognition and consciousness researchers advance similar arguments. For example, Grush (2000) writes that a first-person perspective allows a system to conceive of itself as part of an independent, objective order, while at the same time being anchored in it and act as a subject. I

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believe that this can be a useful model for an action researcher who wishes to develop valid theory using any other form of qualitative inquiry. I believe that action research is particularly well positioned to develop theory using the holistic paradigm, because action research already has a welldeveloped rigorous understanding of first-person research (Marshall, 2001; Torbert, 2001), which can keep the researcher authentic (Benefiel, 2005) and act as an effective analytical device. As Reason and Bradbury (2001) point out, attempts at third-person research, which are not based in rigorous first-person inquiry into ones purposes and practices, are open to distortion through unregulated bias. Adler (personal communication, 2004) says that good scholarship happens in a reflexive distance, when the scholar reflects on action from a distance but not from outside of it. However, Marshalls (2001) comment, How to work with it generatively, rather than being self absorbed or self indulgent, is a key challenge of self reflective practice is a very valid one, given the danger of self-referential spin that self-reflexivity could take. Through the holistic paradigmatic framework, I have offered the concepts of researcher as insider-outsider and the researchers process of exploring affirmations and ambivalences as methodological devices to develop the interplay between subjective ontology and objective epistemology. Based on research in educational settings as consultant-researchers, Bartunek and Louis (1996) developed the concept of insider-outsider action research. Grounded in the constructivist paradigm, they advocate a team of insiders and outsiders work together tempering each others reality and perceptions and constructing a mutually advantageous action and theory agenda, in a way, triangulation constructivist fashion. While seemingly similar, based on the advaia philosophy, in the concept of researcher as insider-outsider proposed by me, a researcher is simultaneously an insider and an outsider. Advaita philosophy also offers a way to do this; it advocates an active, intense engagement without attachment. Bhagavad Gita, one of the key Hindu scriptures, calls this state detached attachment. In this state, one sees the universe and creation as Gods Lila or Play and yet engages with it. Maya is the term used by Hindus to denote this illusion. The closest I could come to describing this concept for my own understanding was through an analogy of a simulated ride in an amusement center. Until we enter in and buckle the seat belts, we are fully aware that it is just a simulated ride and none of it is real but once we are in it, we continue to be aware that it is still a simulation but that doesnt make the ride and its effects any less real. One may refuse to play with it, or play with it believing that the play is the only reality and without being aware of the truth that it is just a game, or play with it intensely but with complete awareness of the unreal nature of it of all. I believe that it is the third approach that is ideal for interplay between ontological subjectivity and epistemological objectivity. Finally, considering that not many action researchers write about how they build theory (Dick, 2004), this article also contributes by transparently and

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explicitly laying out how a particular theoretical category was developed using a juxtaposition of constant comparative technique with self-reflexivity rooted in a holistic paradigm. Eden and Huxham (1996) write that focus on the individual practitioner is an important area for action researchers who wish to develop effective professional practice. This kind of first-person research based theory is a particular strength of action research. I hope this article will be a contribution to the enhancement of the community of action researchers.

Conclusion
In this article, I describe a holistic paradigm based on the advaita (non-dualism) philosophy. I compare this with the conventional dualistic ontology and critical realism and argue that this paradigm is appropriate for developing theory in action research because it facilitates interplay between ontological subjectivity and epistemological objectivity. I have suggested two devices to do this: researcher as insider-outsider and researchers affirmations and ambivalences. I have provided examples of the use of this framework and the devices from my action research study.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the community that has been profiled in this study, for their warmth, hospitality and generosity. I also wish to thank Hilary Bradbury for pointing me to this special issue. My thanks also go to the three editors of this special issue, Gerald Midgley, the two anonymous reviewers, Victor Friedman, Tim Rogers for their invaluable feedback. I particularly want to thank Bob Dick for shepherding this article to maturity.

References
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Latha Poonamallee is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior in the School of Business & Economics at Michigan Technological University. She received her PhD in Organizational Behavior from Case Western Reserve University. Her research interests are radical change, sustainable communities and globalization, inter-organizational partnerships, and qualitative research methods. Address: School of Business & Economics, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, MI 49931, USA. [Email: lcpoonam@mtu.edu]

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