9 Reflecting on your learning and putting it into practice

Looking at empowering research (1)

This course has introduced you to ways of rethinking research as a process of empowerment rather than disempowerment. Where conventional, mainstream management and organisational research has for too long followed Western logics of extracting knowledge and utilising it for the researchers’ own means, there is now a move away from these accepted (yet problematic) practices towards developing more empowering research that benefits participants.

Empowering research, as this course shows, is not easy or straightforward, but is possible and important at a time when the histories, cultures and social practices of many already marginalised groups are being further disavowed and lost. Empowering research therefore has an important role to play, not just through the practices of individuals working with particular communities, but also as a collective call for radical transformation of why, how and for whom research is done.

The preceding sections of this course have introduced you to key ideas for thinking about empowering methodologies in organisational research. In this final section, you have an opportunity to reflect on what you have learned and consider how you can put what you have learned into practice.