Action research is research that each of us can do on our own perform, that “we” (any team or family or informal community of practice) can do to improve its perform, or that bigger organizations or institutions can conduct on themselves, assisted or guided by specialized researchers, with the aim of improving their strategies, practices, and information of the environments within which they practice.

In that paper, he described action research as “a comparative research on the conditions and effects of various forms of social action and research leading to social action” that uses “a spiral of steps, each of which is composed of a circle of planning, action, and fact-finding about the result of the action”.

Action research is not only a research that describes how humans and organizations behave in the outside world but also a change mechanism that helps human and organizations reflect on and change their own systems (Reason & Bradbury, 2001). After six decades of action research development, many methodologies have been evolved, ranging:

1. From those that are more driven by the researcher’s plan to those more ambitious by participants;

2. From those that are motivated primarily by instrumental target achievement to those motivated primarily by the aim of personal, organizational, or societal transformation; and

3. From 1st-, to 2nd-, to 3rd-person research (i.e. my research on my own action, aimed primarily at personal change; our research on our group (family/team), aimed primarily at improving the group; and ‘educated’ research aimed primarily at theoretical generalization and/or large scale change.