When Successful Action Research is not Legitimized as Scientific Contribution by the Central Sponsors: How can Morten Levin’s Three Pillars of Action Research Support the Arch of Research Collaboration between Large Public Organizations and Universities?

Morten Levin’s work on Action Research (AR) clearly stated that the three pillars participation, action and research was equally important. During his long practice as an AR pioneer, he campaigned for the legitimacy of AR within academia. In this paper we investigate how AR is perceived as sound research within a large and distributed organization. We present a retrospective case study based on a research collaboration between UiT The Artic University of Norway (UiT) and the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Organization (NAV), that fostered an AR project together, ‘Work inclusion, learning and innovation’ (ALIN), but later led to the termination of the collaboration agreement. The ALIN project fulfils all the criteria for being a successful AR project in terms Levin’s action, research and participation criteria. However, external audit and central NAV actors had different expectations of successful institutional research collaboration. Through our case we illustrate several conflict dimensions within the three AR pillars that must be challenged to strengthen the legitimacy of AR. The debate on rigour and relevance should not be limited to academic fields and include various actors and decision makers within large and distributed organizations.