The act of theorising turns the attention from the outcome of theory generation to the act of theory generation itself. Revans' systems "alpha," "beta" and "gamma" provide a foundational action theory that grounds the theorising process in action learning. This is the core of theorising in the praxeology of action…

This account of practice is about the 'Scale Up' programme, an attempt by an external consultant and their client to implement a model of Action Learning in an academic environment. It tells the story of establishing an Action Learning programme for local business leaders in collaboration with an academic business school. The programme involved…

This year marks the 25th anniversary since action learning (AL) was first introduced in 1993 in South Korea. Although AL has greatly contributed to meeting organizational needs so that it would result in its strong presence as an organizational learning tool, there is no single review study on the development of AL practice in Korea. The purpose…

The contribution of scholarship to practice is an on-going concern of the AL/HRD community. This paper explores how one influential discourse may shape AL/HRD's understanding of that contribution. In 2020 the UK Government implemented the Knowledge Exchange Framework (KEF) to gather data on English Universities' knowledge exchange activities.…

There is concern that management and business research favours rigour and theory over relevance and practice. There are pressures from funding councils for researchers to show more impact. The paper shows how the bridge between the academic world and the world of practice can be served by action learning. Consideration is given to the difficulties…

The starting assumption of this paper is that the management scholar-practitioner does not exist as a stable distinct category. Rather, scholarly practice may be better understood as the on-going entanglements between scholarly insight and practitioner knowledge. The learning that occurs when practitioners transition to scholarly-practititioners…

This account of practice follows an action learning project that considered the contribution of the 'L = P + Q + R' formula to the teaching of thinking skills to 31 pre-service teachers in Turkey, including the risks in the process of AL. The participants were observed as exhibiting developments in learning (L) thinking skills through questioning…

This paper considers the logic of practice of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in relation to critical action learning: in particular "habitus" which is co-created with field and the interplay amongst the two in the form of misrecognition and risk. We draw on interviews with participants who have experienced action learning as part…

This paper applies an action research (AR) design and action learning (AL) approach to network capability development in an entrepreneurial context. Recent research suggests that networks are a viable strategy for the entrepreneurial firm to overcome the liabilities associated with newness and smallness. However, a gap emerges as few, if any,…