The purpose of this article is to present a specific approach to the practice of action research 'in complex organisations'. Clearly, there are many approaches to the challenge of doing action research in organisations; approaches that are, and also must be, quite context dependent and specific. But my purpose is neither to give an overview nor a recommendation of how action research is or should be done in complex organisations by different schools of action researchers around the world. The approach I will present has grown through practical experience accumulated over many years with doing action research in many different Norwegian organisations with organisational change and development as the specific objective. I will limit myself to an outline of this Norwegian context, and to how I and others have worked specifically with organisational learning both practically and theoretically within or in relation to a broad Norwegian or Scandinavian approach to action research and organisation development represented by many individuals. 1

The article outlines ethical aspects of action research at two different levels: philosophical and ‘applied’. It also emphasizes ethical aspects of practitioner research and conventional social research tacitly implied in the relations between researchers and researched presupposed by the two approaches. Conventional research ethics is insufficient for grasping these aspects, since it is constituted within the relations assumed by conventional research. Conventional research ethics is also claimed to be a ‘condescending ethics’ unfit for action research because of its practice of ‘othering’ human beings as research subjects. This article interprets many ethical dilemmas experienced by action researchers as ‘othering-effects’, only to be overcome through the establishment of peer communities of inquiry among combined ‘practitioners-researchers-researched’. It uses a book on ethics and action research as a starting point for reflections about the very real challenges of creating peer communities of inquiry doing action/practitioner research.

The purpose of this position paper is to trigger a discussion on different methods that can be used to produce change and to support development through reflecting back practices to the practitioners. Our aim is to discuss their similarities and differences and how these methods fit within the broader horizon of engaged research. We do this by relating the discussion to the current "turn to practice" within organisation and management studies (Gherardi, 2001;Miettinen, Samra-Fredericks, & Yanow, 2009; Nicolini, Gherardi, & Yanow, 2003;Nicolini, 2009). We present a preliminary sketch of the kinds of approaches we believe need to be included and related in order to fully see the potentials, the limitations, and the significance of a practical turn and practice based theorizing within social research. We do this because all these kinds of approaches are normally not gathered and discussed together in relation to each other, and because we think they should. We're pleading for a broad and inclusive but also critical exchange and dialogue, and hopefully this short introduction can at least suggest some reasons why and how. Without providing final answers, then, we want to raise a few questions about the meaning of "turning to practice" and "practice based studies" when addressing the issue of reflection. What does it mean for social

PurposeThe purpose of the article is to aid the reader in understanding the knowledge claims in different forms of action research and to see what kind of “turn to practice” is required in research on organising, organisational learning, and management.Design/methodology/approachA conceptual framework extracted from the philosophy of Aristotle is presented for understanding the knowledge claims of action research in relation to other approaches.FindingsSome form of action research should be pursued, but action research is a label covering many different approaches suggesting different ways of relating knowledge and action.Research limitations/implicationsIn order to provide valid, practicable knowledge both action research and mainstream research need to reconfigure and sort things better. The call is for doing more organizational research as “praxis research” as part of late modern, socially distributed knowledge production modes.Practical implicationsThe required reconfiguration of organizational research also requires systematic organizational learning in work organizations.Originality/valueProviding a conceptual framework that is able to grasp the different knowledge forms operating under socially distributed “mode 2” conditions, and to point out required implications for both research and practice, is new.

This article presents the idea of "symbiotic learning systems" as a possible strategy for dealing with institutional knowledge and learning challenges posed by an emerging transition from "socially monopolized" to "socially distributed" knowledge generation and distribution. As knowledge production and learning become increasingly relocated from segregated and specialized institutions for research and education and socially distributed to and within "ordinary" work life, corresponding changes are required in the basic institutionalized relationships between research, higher education, and practical knowledge application. The concept of "symbiotic learning" addresses these problems by deconstructing age-old divisions between vocational and liberal education. In order to build foundations for a changed and improved relationship between advanced organizations in work life and institutions of higher education and research (HEIs), the general preconditions for learning in the work places themselves need to be addressed. In modeling general preconditions for learning, and even in transcending the division of labor between manual and intellectual work, inspiration is found in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, and in their search for intellectual "commons" (tà koiná) as constituting public spheres and community among individuals.