Trade Union Strategies and Action Research

This article is about the relationship between research and change in working life. It focuses upon changes in technology and work organization, and includes changes in information systems. It also focuses upon research that is action oriented. Such “actionresearch”—we will call it this until our discussion in the concluding section—highlights the relationship between the researcher and the actor in the social situation. This is true of both the behavior of different actors and of the content of the research (perspectives, problems, possible solutions). The social side of technological change in working life will be emphasized. This means that what can be called the socio-technical tradition within systems design will be examined and discussed. Then the paper will consider form and procedure. A typology of trade-union strategies for technological change is presented and research methods relating to such strategies are described. Against this background, the concept of actionresearch is discussed and developed.