ABSTRACT
Research and consultancy are often thought of as different, in many ways opposed, activities. Researchers are supposed to be objective and refrain from intervening in any system they are studying, while consultants, of course, are required to intervene and inevitably become involved in the internal politics of the organization they are consulting to. In this chapter, Bjørner Christensen, a consultant in Norway, argues that researching human interaction is inevitably a participative, subjective activity bound to affect what is being studied in much the same way as consulting. This is by no means a new contention, and Christensen explains how action researchers have always taken the view that the way to understand a human system is to intervene and try to change it. Action researchers are thus both researchers and consultants at the same time.
