https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6897-5432
Olav Eikeland’s unexpected passing (10 October 1955 – 1 September 2023) is a great loss for action research and for those of us who worked with and learned from him. We have collaborated to write this appreciation, each of us from our own and diverse experiences of Olav. Our aim is to invite you to take on his work and to learn from him how to improve and extend action research.
Davydd Greenwood, Goldwin Smith professor of anthropology emeritus, Cornell University
Olav did not believe that it was possible to ‘mainstream’ action research by compromising philosophical anchoring and integrity, leavened by extensive practice in real organizational contexts followed by detailed analysis of what was done and learned. He believed that action research would come to naught if we did not spend great effort on preparing people to conduct action research better through the development of a variety of systematic educational programs.
Too often action research is justified by the prosocial ends it aims to produce. Often, this moral-political justification is not matched by the conceptual clarity with which many of us operate. In addition to the complexities of doing action research, Olav insisted that we operate with clear conceptual distinctions and well-anchored intellectual genealogies. He did not accept loose commonplaces about action research and social-organizational change.
A consistent target in his work is ‘spectator’ social science in which the researcher believes that objectivity, clarify, and efficacy is obtained by maintaining a pseudo-objective distance from the subjects and their organizational contexts. A significant part of his corpus is built on laying out the theoretical and conceptual frameworks and concepts that support this critique. Beyond critique, Olav provides well-structured options to overcome the problems, based heavily on his world-class work on Aristotle, including his tour de force, The Ways of Aristotle (2008), and supplemented by analysis of other philosophers and theoretical approaches, and activated through a variety of educational practices.
Taking on Olav’s critique and demands is not a simple matter. I know that my own experience of reading and interacting with him was sobering. It made clear to me how I oversimplified in a major way key Aristotelian concepts in my own defenses of action research. It also showed me that making rather unspecific claims for the scientific validity of action research, while not wrong, was based on an over-simplified concept of science. Recognizing this was challenging but worthwhile because it has had the effect of improving my thinking and practice of action research. In this way, Olav continues to be a mentor and teacher whose work points to a more discerning and better anchored practice of action research.
I am certain others can learn similar and other lessons from his works. Olav’s extended ResearchGate and Academia.edu pages are filled with downloadable versions of many of his writings. Clearly, he was committed to sharing what he learned as widely as possible.
Ignoring the demands Olav placed on action research is not a winning strategy for our field or for our collaborators in their organizations and communities.
Lars Klemsdal: professor, department of sociology and human geography, University of Oslo
Olav Eikeland has been a great inspiration to many young scholars within the field of action research and democratic working life studies, and sparked many a career, including mine. He was a clear minded and eloquent philosopher whose texts conveyed important insights on the foundations of knowledge development and learning through democratic dialogue. He was also an experienced practitioner of the facilitation of such dialogues in action within contemporary organizations and working life.
Olav approached action research practically [sic] by a thorough exegesis of classical philosophy, especially by reading the complete works of Aristotle. He extracted, in a clear and readable voice, how the philosophical foundations of experience, learning and participation in enactment of a full life as human beings could represent a vibrant practical source for the ways to enact worklife democracy through dialogue.
He then demonstrated these perspectives in context showing the practical value of these insights by facilitating dialogues in a variety of organizations through numerous action research projects, conducted from his base at the Work Research Institute in Oslo and thereafter at the Oslo University College and Oslo Metropolitan University. As a young, aspiring scholar, I was invited into this universe of deep thought and ambitious praxis. It conceptualized and shaped my later career distinctively by letting me experience the compatibility of complex theoretical work and relevant, impactful action.
Olav experienced this combination of philosophy and practice also as a balancing act that was difficult to accommodate in the various public spheres surrounding his work. On the one hand, he was not infrequently faced with attitudes illustrated in one of our colleagues’ utterances: ‘Is it really necessary to know Aristotle to conduct democratic dialogue in organizations?’ alluding to the assumed complication of reading Aristotle, even indirectly through Eikeland’s texts, as an unnecessary detour for the purpose of doing action research. Unfortunately, Olav often experienced such attitudes, and they limited how his contributions were received, based on assumptions and presumptions rather than on engagement with his works.
For those of us who were lucky to engage with his texts, we found that, far from complicated unnecessary detours, his texts conveyed in a very clear way the foundations of our activities as action researchers and deepened our sense of what we were up to. I remember reading his PhD dissertation published as Erfaring, dialogikk og politikk (Universitetsforlaget, 1997) as his passenger in his small Volkswagen Jetta on our way to facilitate the capacity for organizational learning in a municipality in southern Norway. There, in the passenger seat, as the low powered car struggled up the hills, I realized how philosophy could be mind-expanding for your own practice. It was a 600-page page-turner, unfortunately, then, only in Norwegian. It disclosed that what we were up to in Arendal was nothing less than advancing the basics of solidary human relationships, not in a pretentious, but in a humble way.
On the other hand, being a philosopher who engaged in mundane development projects in organizations and enterprises could place his status as a philosopher in academic jeopardy. This helps explain how his unique engagement in the work of Aristotle didn’t receive the attention it deserved within scholarly discourse among professional philosophers.
Olav thus never felt fully at home in any camp. Fortunately, this didn’t stop him from ‘going on’ his own way and following ‘the ways of Aristotle’. When he began publishing his works internationally, he finally got some of the audience he deserved. And now that his texts will continue to live out there in libraries and on the web, we can hope for a steady increase in this audience.
Johan Elvemo Ravn, chief scientist, SINTEF and professor, faculty of social science, Nord University
Action research today has a stronger place in academia than ever before, both with its own journals and with higher acceptance rates for manuscript submissions in others. This has not always been the case. Being in the action research field has, for many of us, me included, at times been experienced as a vulnerable position. Action research is still a marginal enterprise, particularly in the academic and consulting worlds, albeit less so now than a few decades ago.
Olav greatly contributed to strengthening the academic self-confidence of colleagues and students. With a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy and his general solid philosophical expertise, he was able to use these tools as a defense for action research’s undeniable scientific legitimacy. In this regard, he was a reassuring force and important ally for many of us.
But Olav’s role as a champion and defender of action research was surpassed by his contribution to developing action research, practically as well as conceptually. Throughout his career, he worked to develop the relationships between work, education, learning, development and research, always with a basis in dialogical practice. Nationally and internationally, his conceptual contributions can hardly be overestimated. Some examples are his practical concept of the ‘development organization’, his concept of ‘immanent criticism’ as a method to strengthen the rationale for the research, his well-developed critique of the spectator position and all his explorations of dialogic practice and dialogic theory of knowledge.
His ‘deep drilling’ and concept development around thinking as a reflective practice and as a reflection on practice, in the back room and in dialogue with others, is monumental. There may be similarities with ‘reflective practice’ in Donald Schön’s sense, but Olav’s reflective practice it is more collectively expressed, and here the reuse of Aristotelian nuances and distinctions was important.
These positions and his expositions of their details are as relevant now as they were when first published.
Julie Borup Jensen, professor, department of culture and learning, Aalborg University
Olav will be remembered for his empowering support for and scholarly mark on action research. His energetic role in the action research communities in Scandinavia will be deeply missed. One such role was as a co-founding member and permanent editor of the Scandinavian journal Research and Change, rooted in the action research environment around University College Copenhagen (KP).
In Denmark, he has been renowned for his indefatigable work and consistent voice for research that recognizes the myriad of creative ways in which knowing and expertise may express themselves in organizational practices and relations between humans. In his later career (2018-2020), he was a respected guest professor at the Department of Learning and Philosophy at Aalborg University. After this, we continued to collaborate with Olav in various ways until his death: in our research network, Learning and Change, with publication work and editing a special issue on his favorite subject of developing more sophisticated conceptual frameworks for action research, ‘Conceptualizing action research: basic assumptions and terminology in action research’. The ambition was to investigate the deeper implications of the words we use to conceptualize our research.
In Aalborg, we will miss Olav’s preoccupation with democratic practice in organizations, which was both deeply rooted in the philosophy of Aristotle and expressed in his practice. By means of his philosophical, sophisticated, and yet concrete, reflections on professional work in welfare fields, he had an immense influence on many young researchers’ scholarly self-confidence within their professional fields, including my own. His patient and never-yielding use of Aristotle’s language for knowing provided us with nuanced understandings of what we were attempting to accomplish in our research. In practice, in every meeting, encounter or conversation at our department, Olav insisted on dialogue as a path to democratic deliberation. He refused to give up until we had explored all situational aspects of a given phenomenon in society, whereby new and nuanced understandings of the matter at hand were reached and shared among us. In this way, his presence was always immanently critical and constructive at the same time, leaving us with a feeling of being blessed with new insight, when leaving any encounter with him. This dialogue practice lingered in our department long after his return to Oslo.
His freedom of thought often put himself and his philosophical work in critical opposition to what he termed mainstream or spectator social science. However, we in Aalborg experienced this critical opposition as an attempt to act as a shield for younger researchers, like myself, to have the space and time to develop and grow as scholars.
In Aalborg, we will miss Olav’s warm and humorous presence, and we will miss seeing his face and hearing his voice over Zoom at our future network meetings.
Suggested publications:
The Ways of Aristotle: Aristotelian Phrónêsis, Aristotelian Philosophy of Dialogue, and Action Research, Peter Lang, 2008.
Olav’s ResearchGate and Academia.edu sites are generously provided with full-text downloads making it easy to learn about his different lines of work.