Syst Pract Act Res (2006) 19:189–200 DOI 10.1007/s11213-006-9011-y ORIGINAL PAPER Workplace Logics, Kinds of Knowledge and Action Research Thomas Hansson Received: 10 April 2005 / Accepted: 4 January 2006 / Published online: 31 May 2006 C  Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. 2006 Abstract Workplace logics signify attitudes that employees express in close interaction, for- mal decision-making and collaborative interventions. The term covers a metaphorical mental context rather than a mathematically coherent understanding of social control mechanisms that influence interlocutors in cooperative activity. Workplace logics relate to future-oriented choices that employees make so as to obtain targeted production goals. But logics also hold an explanatory potential. They enable for the researcher to account for social systems that need to be designed before they are acted on. The objective for analysing workplace logics is to turn attention away from language and focus on activity systems. Successful action research facilitates for individual and organizational learning, the latter of which is rarely fulfilled in contemporary research. Keywords Common ground . Design . Textual and actionable knowledge 1. Introduction A general problem for the social sciences is that research merely contributes to aggregation of academic discourse, i.e. textual knowledge. Practitioners and academics need knowledge to act on. This article is inspired by Zimmer’s (2001) practical and theoretical understanding of “action-learning cycles” and Argyris’ (1993) study of how smart people learn. The first part describes the contexts of investigation and justification. Another part explores interaction between palettes of logics, all of which relate to action research. Finally, a case study of a steering committee meeting illustrates how oral exchanges help furthering our understanding of actionable knowledge. Over the years a debate over the characteristics of action research (AR) has been an on- going story. Arguments cover a range of methodological-ideological, collective-individual and instrumental-philosophical themes. In responding to a crude portrayal of positivist empiricism in Reason and Torbert (2001) or a general description of local theory in T. Hansson () University of Southern Denmark, Institute of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Religious Studies e-mail: hansson@ifpr.sdu.dk Springer