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Thomas Schumacher
When shall we three meet again? : Learning Journey as Collaborative Organizational Research Method
2013-08-13
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Schumacher, Thomas
The author presents and illustrates the “learning journey”, a cooperative research approach involving practitioners not as passive informants but as active research partners. Making systematic use of a number of practitioners in two different roles the learning journey taps their specific observations, reflexion and sense making to explore and understand the "how" and "why" of organizational phenomena. Practice-oriented research, focussing largely on traditional research methods like interviews and observations is confronted with methodical weaknesses especially when it comes to understanding the tacit, embedded and contextual nature of the explored phenomena and the taken for granted assumptions. The learning journey addresses some of the key critiques on the traditional methods by exploiting the collective reflection of practical experts in two distinctive research roles and perspectives in addition to the researcher´s perspective. By introducing the learning journey as an additional method for studying organizational phenomena we intent to complement existing methods on case study research, ethnographic approaches as well as some reflective approaches in action research. In addition to being “just another method” completing the methodological repertoire the learning journey raises particular interesting fundamental questions in regard to doing practice oriented and collaborative research.