Clinical Action Research and Its Radically Reflexive Way: Dialogical Encounters to Face Current Organizational Needs

Abstract

The paper presents a clinical and radically reflexive approach to action research, capable of nurturing caring relationships and renewed organizational wealth. These outcomes are achieved by creating space for research-oriented, in-the-moment, constitutive, and collective reflexivity. The paper discusses a framework for understanding a clinical and radically reflexive approach to action research. Second, the radically reflexive perspective is illustrated via a case study. Finally, the specific conditions and limits of such an approach are discussed. The radically reflexive perspective we present hopes to return researchers and participants to the center as authors of renewed organizational landscapes, thanks to their collective agency and their capacity to resist the taken-for-granted cultural and social structures whose “sickness” often has a toxic and unconscious impact on people lives. The paper, therefore, contributes to an understanding of radical reflexivity in action research and its implications for productive dialogue between other clinical, dialogical, and reflexive action-research approaches.