First Person Action Research: Living Life as Inquiry

About Judi Marshall

Judi Marshall is a Professor Emerita of Leadership and Learning at Lancaster University Management School UK in the Department of Organisation Work and Technology.   After a few years as a market researcher Judi did her PhD on managerial job stress at UMIST working with Cary Cooper. This led to a series of joint articles and books.  In 1978 Judi joined the Organizational Behaviour Group in the School of Management at the University of Bath. There her interests included women in management organizational culture change careers action research and sustainability. The latter a set of issues and urgent challenges she has been integrating into management education research and her own organizational action since the 1980s.   Whilst at Bath publications included: Women Managers: Travellers in a Male World (Wiley 1984); Women Managers Moving On (Routledge 1995); explorations of the gendering of corporate social responsibility; attention to responsible careers (with Svenja Tams); and a sequence of publications on first person action research including Living life as inquiry (Systemic Practice and Action Research 1999) an approach that aspires to treat life as an ongoing experiment.   Working with doctoral and Masters students and supervising their dissertations has been a key area of Judis expertise. At Bath she was a core member of the Centre for Action Research in Professional Practice (CARPP) and a tutor on the learning community based Postgraduate Programme in Action Research.  She was a co-designer (with Gill Coleman and Peter Reason) and Director of Studies for the action research-based MSc in Responsibility and Business Practice (1997-2010) for mature part-time course participants who were seeking to contribute to change in their organizations professional fields own lives and society. The co-authored book Leadership for Sustainability: An action research approach (Routledge 2011) includes 29 stories of seeking to contribute to systemic change from people who had undertaken the Masters.   Judi moved on from Bath and joined Lancaster University in 2008 in the then Department of Management Learning and Leadership. Her work included teaching research writing and organizational action about sustainability and she especially appreciated belonging to a network of people across the University and local community concerned about these issues. She co-developed the MA in Leadership for Sustainability and tutored on the inquiry-based MA in Management Learning and Leadership.   Judis contributions to action research have continued since formal retirement including the book First Person Action Research: Living life as inquiry (Sage 2016) and an article co-authored with Margaret Gearty Living life as inquiry a systemic practice for change agents (Systemic Practice and Action Research online 2020).