Action Research

Prof Judi Marshall

Judi was at the School of Management, University of Bath from 1978 to 2008, where she was a core member of the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice (CARPP).  In 2008 she moved to Lancaster University Management School, where she is now Professor Emerita in Learning and Leadership.

Judi repeatedly explored what she was next curious about – including managers’ job stress, women in management, the dynamics of systemic change, ‘responsible’ careers, education and action for sustainability, and the gendering of corporate social responsibility.  Throughout her career, Judi has articulated the processes of going about researching, seeing research as personal and political process. 

In 1997 Judi, Gill Coleman and Peter Reason developed the MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice at Bath, addressing issues of sustainability, social justice and systemic change.  Judi was its Director of Studies until 2007.  Leadership for Sustainability: An action research approach (2011 & 2023, Routledge) tells the stories of 30 graduates from the degree.

Judi’s contributions to action research include First person action research: Living life as inquiry (2016, Sage), and a recent paper on ‘living life as inquiry’ with Margaret Gearty.  Copies of some of Judi’s papers can be found on www.jmarshall.org.uk

Dr Gill Coleman

Gill is an educator and researcher with more than 25 years’ experience of working with action research-based approaches to personal and organizational learning and change, particularly connected to issues of sustainability and social justice.

In the mid-1990s she left an academic post at Bristol University to join the New Academy of Business, a radical business education venture sponsored by Anita Roddick of The Body Shop International. While there, she worked with Judi Marshall and Peter Reason at the University of Bath to establish the MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice, and helped establish and run a successor course, the Msc in Sustainability and Responsibility, at Ashridge Business School (now Hult International Business School) from 2009.

These programmes were innovative in the way they expressed the view that pro-sustainability change involves more than just knowledge and information: that personal reflection, collaborative working and a willingness to try new things in practice and learn from what happens also matter.

Gill has also been involved in action research doctoral teaching and supervision at Bath and at Ashridge, and has done workplace-based action research projects in the UK, US and Middle East.

Dr Margaret Gearty

Margaret is an independent action researcher, originally from Ireland and now based near Bath in the UK where she enjoys exploring the local woods and cold water swimming when feeling brave! Her particular interests lie in how action research and storytelling – rooted in the everyday – might be creatively combined to develop meaningful personal and systemic responses to social and environmental issues.

One expression of this has been her widely recognised work with  ‘learning histories’ as a means of surfacing stories and spreading learning about how to innovate and adapt within complex challenges.  Another expression is her more recent work on ‘poetic activism’ as a potential response to the eco-social crisis. She blogs regularly here on the topic. Recently Margaret joined Judi Marshall in writing about ‘living life as inquiry’  – as an embodied practice for change agents. Margaret consults and collaborates with others from the public- and private- sector via her research practice New Histories which she established in 2012.  For a decade now, Margaret’s been a member of the teaching faculty at Ashridge /Hult business school. She tutors on their PhD in organisational change (EDOC), and until 2018 on the MSc in Sustainability and Responsibility (AMSR) and was director of studies there from 2016-18

Prof Peter Reason

As Director of the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice at the University of Bath, England, Peter was an international leader in the development of participative approaches to action research. In these forms of experiential inquiry all are co-researchers, contributing both to the thinking that forms the research and to the action that is its subject. He contributed to the articulation of a participatory worldview, and published widely, co-editing the first two editions of the Handbook of Action Research: Participative Inquiry and Practice and co-founding the journal Action Research.

Since retiring from full time academic work, Peter has focused on writing books and articles that link the tradition of nature writing with the ecological crisis of our times, drawing on scientific, ecological, philosophical, and spiritual sources. He undertook two ecological pilgrimages at sea; explored the place of art and poetry in a time of ecological catastrophe; writes and sings ‘songs for the Earth’; and is currently engaged in series of experiential and co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism in relation to Rivers.  Most of Peter’s action research publications and his later ecological writing are at https://www.peterreason.net/.