Paul Gray Boston College, USA

Paul S. Gray is Associate Professor of Sociology at Boston College. He received his A.B. from Princeton, an M.A. from Stanford, and the Ph.D. from Yale University. He is principal author of The Research Imagination, a comprehensive methods text published by Cambridge University Press. This work includes a lengthy section on Action Research.

He first became interested in Action Research in the 1980’s while teaching in the graduate program in Social Economy and Social Policy at BC. Students were looking for an engaged methodology that could help them to bridge the gap between the roles of researcher-as-outsider and change-maker-as-insider. Several of his graduate students have utilized Action Research in their own work in settings as diverse as urban bureaucracy, banks, investment firms, labor unions, for-profit enterprises, and the U.S. Forest Service.

Subsequently, Paul joined with Bill Torbert and other colleagues in the Carroll School of Management and the Department of Sociology at BC to create the Leadership for Change Executive Program, where he served as Faculty Chair for 15 years. This program taught principles of action research and action learning to executives and managers in real-time, real-life organizational settings. As an organizational consultant, Paul’s specialties are workshop design, leadership development and coaching, and corporate-community relations. In all these domains, his practice encourages participants’ active contribution and reflection.