The Action Research Dissertation: Learning from Leading Change

2024 SPE Outstanding Book Award Honorable Mention

The idea of the doctorate is undergoing a transformation as experts explore the nature of “doctorateness” and its relevance for current organizational and societal challenges. The professional practice doctorate has emerged as a highly useful framework to address these challenges and it necessarily requires a distinctive approach to the doctoral dissertation.

The Action Research Dissertation: Learning from Leading Change shares a framework for the action research dissertation, outlining the specific ways in which action research fosters the development of scholar-leaders. It offers both doctoral students who are practitioners in applied fields, and the faculty who guide them in their doctoral research, a comprehensive and applied approach to action research that focuses on facilitating and leading change in organizations, as well as ways to address how to translate the findings of this work into a rigorous, dissertation research study.

Throughout the book, the authors explicitly address the connection between the parallel and mutually-reinforcing processes of taking action and conducting research, offering rich insights, tools, and case examples that outline specifically how to use action research to both guide a change effort and generate useful insights to contribute to theory-building.

This is an essential book for a variety of readers, including professional practice doctoral students, faculty directing the studies of those students, program administrators, professional development coordinators, and many others.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Action Research, Action Research, Applied Research, Qualitative Research, Mixed Methods Research, and Case Study Research