The Ethics of Involvement with the Already Involved

In the literature on action research, ‘participation’ tends to be one of the central terms around which both the research design and the ethical considerations are built (Reason and Bradbury 2006a, Nielsen, Nielsen and Olsén 2006, Svensson and Aagaard Nielsen 2006). In this chapter we will instead elaborate on the concept of ‘involvement’ as an entry point to consider questions of ethics in terms of power and the particular power relations that surface in the processes of planning and doing action research. Our hope is to contribute to the ongoing ethical considerations within action research on the whys, whos and hows of collaboration in the social fields that we study.