Releasing the Power of the Positive Question Abstract

Date:   3/6/2021 4:05:00 PM ( 3 y ago)

Appreciative Inquiry:

Releasing the Power of the Positive Question Abstract

This chapter illustrates how appreciative inquiry can be used as a positive model of action research to dislodge reified vocabularies of human deficit and liberate the socially constructive potential of organizations and human communities.

It begins by demonstrating the ways in which critical forms of action research unwittingly diminish the generative potential of human communities by favoring problem-focused modes of inquiry.

Deficit-based questions lead to deficit-based conversations, which in turn lead to deficit-based patterns of action. Two case illustrations are offered to show how appreciative inquiry uses the power of the positive question to overturn the tyranny of deficit-based vocabularies and open up new alternatives for conversation and action.

It does this by dislodging the certainty of existing deficit constructions, creating spaces for new voices and languages to emerge, and exp
ending circles of dialogue to build a supportive context for the social construction of reality.

Introduction In their original formulation of appreciative inquiry, Cooperrider and Srivastva (1987) argues that action research has largely failed as an instrument for advancing “second-order” social-organizational transformation (where organizational paradigms, norms, ideologies, or values are changed in fundamental ways) because of its romance with critique at the expense of appreciation.

Action research, they claim, has maintained an unquestioned commitment to a secularized problem-oriented view of the world and thus has diminished the capacity of organizational researchers and practitioners to produce innovative theory capable of inspiring the imagination, commitment, and passionate dialogue required for the consensual re-ordering of social conduct.

In its continuous attempts to determine what is wrong with organizations, action research has lost the ability to see and understand what gives life to organizations and to discover ways to sustain and enhance that life-giving potential.

Learn to track the positive questions and verify the key parts in any situation! This is the road to improving your intelligence!

 

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