PAR practitioners make a concerted effort to integrate three basic aspects of their work: participation (life in society and democracy), action (engagement with experience and history), and research (soundness in thought and the growth of knowledge).

Inquiry based on PAR principles makes sense of the world through collective efforts to transform it, as opposed to simply observing and studying human behaviour and people's views about reality, in the hope that meaningful change will eventually emerge.

PAR can be a way of overcoming the ineffectiveness and elitism of conventional schooling and science, and the negative effects of market forces and industry on the workplace, community life and sustainable livelihoods.

Instead, PAR values embodied knowledge beyond "gated communities" of scholarship, bridging academia and social movements such that research and advocacy — often thought to be mutually exclusive — become intertwined.

[24] These principles and the ongoing evolution of PAR have had a lasting legacy in fields ranging from problem solving in the workplace to community development and sustainable livelihoods, education, public health, feminist research, civic engagement and criminal justice.

It is important to note that these contributions are subject to many tensions and debates on key issues such as the role of clinical psychology, critical social thinking and the pragmatic concerns of organizational learning in PAR theory and practice.

While a common denominator, the combination of participation, action and research reflects the fragile unity of traditions whose diverse ideological and organizational contexts kept them separate and largely ignorant of one another for several decades.

As in mainstream science, this process "regards people as sources of information, as having bits of isolated knowledge, but they are neither expected nor apparently assumed able to analyze a given social reality".

Lewin's understanding of action-research coincides with key ideas and practices developed at the influential Tavistock Institute (created in 1947)) in the UK and National Training Laboratories (NTL) in the US.

An important offshoot of Tavistock thinking and practise is the sociotechnical systems perspective on workplace dynamics, guided by the idea that greater productivity or efficiency does not hinge on improved technology alone.

In this perspective, the best match between the social and technical factors of organized work lies in principles of 'responsible group autonomy' and industrial democracy, as opposed to deskilling and top-down bureaucracy guided by Taylor's scientific management and linear chain of command.

Process consultation, team building, conflict management, and workplace group democracy and autonomy have become recurrent themes in the prolific body of literature and practice known as organizational development (OD).

[37][38] As with 'action science',[39][40][41][42] OD is a response to calls for planned change and 'rational social management' involving a normative human relations movement and approach to worklife in capital-dominated economies.

Tavistock broke new ground in other ways, by meshing general medicine and psychiatry with Freudian and Jungian psychology and the social sciences to help the British army face various human resource problems.

[50] Most formulations of psychosociology share with OD a commitment to the relative autonomy and active participation of individuals and groups coping with problems of self-realization and goal effectiveness within larger organizations and institutions.

[62] Different schools of thought and practice include Mendel's action research framed in a 'sociopsychoanalytic' perspective[63][64] and Dejours's psychodynamics of work, with its emphasis on work-induced suffering and defence mechanisms.

This has resulted in countless experiments in diagnostic assessment, scenario planning[72] and project evaluation in areas ranging from fisheries[73] and mining[74] to forestry,[75] plant breeding,[76] agriculture,[77] farming systems research and extension,[7][78][79] watershed management,[80] resource mapping,[10][81][82] environmental conflict and natural resource management,[2][83][84][85] land rights,[86] appropriate technology,[87][88] local economic development,[89][90] communication,[91][92] tourism,[93] leadership for sustainability,[94] biodiversity[95][96] and climate change.

[108][109][110][111][112][113] The Global Alliance on Community-Engaged Research is a promising effort to "use knowledge and community-university partnership strategies for democratic social and environmental change and justice, particularly among the most vulnerable people and places of the world."

[146] Feminist research and women's development theory[147] also contributed to rethinking the role of scholarship in challenging existing regimes of power, using qualitative and interpretive methods that emphasize subjectivity and self-inquiry rather than the quantitative approach of mainstream science.

[155] Today, applying an intersectional feminist lens to PAR is crucial to recognize the social categories, such as race, class, ability, gender, and sexuality, that construct individuals' power relations and lived experiences.

Therefore, framing PAR's qualitative study methodologies through an intersectional feminist lens mobilizes all experiences – regardless of various social categories and oppressions – as legitimate sources of knowledge.

They extend principles of open-source governance to democratic institutions, allowing citizens to actively engage in wiki-based processes of virtual journalism, public debate and policy development.

[172] Although few and far between, experiments in open politics can thus make use of ICT and the mechanics of e-democracy to facilitate communications on a large scale, towards achieving decisions that best serve the public interest.

[173][174][175][176] Fact-finding and the outputs of science are made accessible to participants and may be subject to extensive media coverage, scientific peer review, deliberative opinion polling and adversarial presentations of competing arguments and predictive claims.

[178] ICTs, open politics and deliberative democracy usher in new strategies to engage governments, scientists, civil society organizations and interested citizens in policy-related discussions of science and technology.

Another implication of PAR ethics is that partners must protect themselves and each other against potential risks, by mitigating the negative consequences of their collaborative work and pursuing the welfare of all parties concerned.

One critical question concerns the problem-solving orientation of engaged inquiry—the rational means-ends focus of most PAR experiments as they affect organizational performance or material livelihoods, for instance.

[2][191][192] How can PAR develop a macro-orientation to democratic dialogue[193] and meet challenges of the 21st Century, by joining movements to support justice and solidarity on both local and global scales?

By keeping things closely tied to local group dynamics, PAR runs the risk of substituting small-scale participation for genuine democracy and fails to develop strategies for social transformation on all levels.

[204] Many PAR practitioners critical of mainstream science and its overemphasis on quantitative data also point out that research based on qualitative methods may be theoretically-informed and rigorous in its own way.