“The concept of action research arises in the behavioural sciences and is obviously applicable to an examination of human activity systems carried out through the process of attempting to solve problems. This core is the idea that the researcher does not remain an observer outside the subject of investigation but becomes a participant in the relevant human group. The researcher becomes a participant in the action, and the process of change itself becomes the subject of research. In action research the roles of researcher and subject are obviously not fixed: the roles of the subject and the practitioner are sometimes switched: the subjects become researchers… and researchers become men of action.”

— Peter Checkland

Source: Systems Thinking, Systems Practice, 1981, p. 152 as cited in: R.L. McCown (2001) "Learning to bridge the gap between science-based decision support and the practice of farming". In: Aust. J. Agric. Res., Vol 52, p. 560-561

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Peter Checkland10

British management scientist 1930

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“The research needed for social practice can best be characterized as research for social management or social engineering. It is a type of action research, a comparative research of the conditions and effects of various forms of social action, and research leading to social action. Research that produces nothing but books will not suffice.”

Kurt Lewin (1890–1947) German-American psychologist

Source: 1940s, Action research and minority problems, 1946, p. 35.

“In June of 1964 the research group and academic program moved to Penn bringing with it most of the faculty, students, and research projects. Our activities flourished in the very supportive environment that Penn and Wharton provided. The wide variety of faculty members that we were able to involve in our activities significantly enhanced our capabilities. By the mid-1960s I had become uncomfortable with the direction, or rather, the lack of direction, of professional Operations Research. I had four major complaints.
First, it had become addicted to its mathematical tools and had lost sight of the problems of management. As a result it was looking for problems to which to apply its tools rather than looking for tools that were suitable for solving the changing problems of management. Second, it failed to take into account the fact that problems are abstractions extracted from reality by analysis. Reality consists of systems of problems, problems that are strongly interactive, messes. I believed that we had to develop ways of dealing with these systems of problems as wholes. Third, Operations Research had become a discipline and had lost its commitment to interdisciplinarity. Most of it was being carried out by professionals who had been trained in the subject, its mathematical techniques. There was little interaction with the other sciences professions and humanities. Finally, Operations Research was ignoring the developments in systems thinking — the methodology, concepts, and theories being developed by systems thinkers.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Preface, cited in Gharajedaghi, Jamshid. Systems thinking: Managing chaos and complexity: A platform for designing business architecture http://booksite.elsevier.com/samplechapters/9780123859150/Front_Matter.pdf. Elsevier, 2011. p. xiii <br class="br">Towards a Systems Theory of Organization, 1985

“The development (rather than the history) of operations research as a science consists of the development of its methods, concepts, and techniques. Operations research is neither a method nor a technique; it is or is becoming a science and as such is defined by a combination of the phenomena it studies.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Source: 1950s, The development of operations research as a science, 1956, p. 265, the lead paragraph ; Cited in: Joe Kelly (1969) Organizational behaviour. p. 26.

“I distinguish two kinds of "applied" research: problem-solving research — government or commercially initiated, centrally managed and institutionally coupled to a plan for application of the results, useful science — investigator-initiated, competitively evaluated and widely communicated. Then we have basic science — useful also, also investigator-initiated, competitively evaluated and widely communicated.”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

Source: Confessions of a Technophile (1994), p. 31

“Research is something that everyone can do, and everyone ought to do. It is simply collecting information and thinking systematically about it. The word ‘research’ carries overtones of abstruse statistics and complex methods, white coats and computers. Some social research is highly specialised but most is not; much of the best research is logically very straightforward. Useful research on many problems can be done with small resources, and should be a regular part of the life of any thoughtful person involved in social action.”

Raewyn Connell (1944) Australian sociologist

Raewyn Connell et al. (1975). How to do small surveys – a guide for students in sociology, kindred industries and allied trades. School of Social Sciences. Flinders University. p. 1.

“An inherent paradox of intellectual activity is that reflection (i. e. the phase were a research project is trying to process a complex problem) can be very time-consuming. Unfortunately, it is only when researchers are driven by a sense of urgency that they can make real progress.”

Éric Pichet (1960) economist

Source: The Epistemology of Social Science (2011), p. 53.

“There are many cases of these algebras which may obviously be combined into natural classes, but the consideration of this portion of the subject will be reserved to subsequent researches.”

Benjamin Peirce Linear Associative Algebra

"Natural Classification", p. 119.
Linear Associative Algebra (1882)

“Research is the process of going up alleys to see if they are blind.”

Marston Bates (1906–1974) American entomologist

The Nature of Natural History (1950)

“In the case of psychology, of course, it is not only the concepts and methods of the discipline that undergo constant historical change, but the very subject matter itself. Human subjectivity, the reality behind the objects of psychological investigation, is itself strongly implicated in the historical process, both as agent and as product.”

Kurt Danziger (1926) German academic

Source: "Does the history of psychology have a future?." 1994, p. 475

“In the last two decades we have witnessed the emergence of the "system" as a key concept in scientific research. Systems, of course, have been studied for centuries, but something new has been added… The tendency to study systems as an entity rather than as a conglomeration of parts is consistent with the tendency in contemporary science no longer to isolate phenomena in narrowly confined contexts, but rather to open interactions for examination and to examine larger and larger slices of nature. Under the banner of systems research (and its many synonyms) we have also witnessed a convergence of many more specialized contemporary scientific developments… These research pursuits and many others are being interwoven into a cooperative research effort involving an ever-widening spectrum of scientific and engineering disciplines. We are participating in what is probably the most comprehensive effort to attain a synthesis of scientific knowledge yet made.”

Russell L. Ackoff (1919–2009) Scientist

Ackoff (1959), "Games, Decisions and Organizations," General Systems, 4 (1959), p. 145-150; cited in: Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1968) General System Theory. p. 9.
1950s

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Peter Checkland10

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