Researcher–Practitioner Partnering in Industry-Funded Participatory Action Research

This paper reflects on our experiences with researcher–practitioner partnering within an industry-funded Participatory Action Research (PAR) project. We find that the nature of partnering in our industry-funded engagement differs from that of traditional, non-industry funded PAR research. The distribution of power on the industry-funded academic-practitioner research team, whilst fairly equitable at the outset of the project, shifted in favour of the practitioner partners with the progressive spillover of credibility and knowledge from the academic to practitioner partners during the course of the engagement. Adhering to recommendations for academic-practitioner research teams, in our experience, does not guarantee successful partnering according to PAR due to the spillover problem. As the academic partners' power base erodes, the discretion to preserve the integrity of the PAR method is increasingly placed in the hands of the practitioner partners.