Editorial Special Issue: Conceptualising Action Research: Basic assumptions and terminology in Action Research Action Research on the rise Olav Eikeland, Søren Frimann, Lone Hersted, and Julie Borup Jensen How do we conceptualise, communicate, and describe Action Research in a language which expresses and corresponds adequately to the basic assumptions behind Action Research? Our call for papers tried to pinpoint some very specific challenges for Action Research as we see it: As Action Researchers, when writing applications for research funds, when communicating research insights, when developing knowledge in collaboration with stakeholders, when reasoning and voicing knowledge in research communities, we often feel forced to navigate in a language field foreign to our Action Research activity, and compelled to use conventional, mostly interpretive social research terminology to legitimise our creation of knowledge as research. This language field is, to a large extent, still based on a principal division of labour between intellectual and manual work, knower and known, and researcher and researched, creating a horizon of meaning linked to a still dominant but old-fashioned and monopolised knowledge management regime. This terminology reflects an institutionalised but hardly validated division of labour in the understanding of social knowledge generation, othering the subjects of study. Thereby the more basic and radical knowledge generation processes hap- pening in certain forms of Action Research are made almost invisible and stretched between the “inner” language of contextual knowledge and value production, and other, “outer” ways of communicating scientific knowledge and research insights presumed as valid by a wider research community and in society at large. Nevertheless, Action Research gains popularity in different professions and professional studies, in management and organszation studies, community development work, and in other areas concerned with practical relevance, application, and development. The situation reflects societal changes concerning the social distribution of education and knowledge generation, from having been monopolised in specialised academic institutions to becoming much more socially distributed. As indicated, social or human knowledge development and creation need to come to its own, and find its own form, similarly to how natural science and technology have come to their own during modernity. Bringing social and human knowledge to its own, however, does not mean imitation or emulation of natural science. Extant forms of inquiry all need to be critically examined, transformed, and adjusted to the radically practice based creation of knowledge in core Action Research. Certain forms of practitioner Action Research are already making progress in their at- tempts at this by connecting to more colloquial and prevalent understandings of experience which do not operate within the divisions of conventional research. These attempts are si- International Journal of Action Research, Vol. 18, Issue 2/2022, 95–99 https://doi.org/10.3224/ijar.v18i2.01