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Social fields have garnered increasing interest among practitioners and researchers, particularly due to the need to address multiple intersecting crises and their societal and organizational impacts. A recent conceptualization by Pomeroy and Herrmann (2023) proposes that social fields have a degree of autonomy that perpetuates phenomena like interaction patterns. The study adopts this lens to empirically examine the shifts at three schools during a longitudinal awareness-based change program. In-depth interviews with school professionals provide insights into the potential of relational awareness to “dive below the vortex” of autonomous and de-generative interaction cycles, facilitating a transition towards responsive and generative cycles. However, while field autonomy was transformed across the entire organization in some cases, persistent patterns were observed in others, indicating variations in the malleability of social fields. The implications of these findings for promoting organizational change are discussed.

In this piece we share our discovery process as action researchers in an online, global change initiative that emerged during the first lockdown of the Covid-19 pandemic, 2020. In the spirit of sharing our work "in the making" we aim to make visible our own reflection process and the questions that surface from it. In particular, we share and explore our realization that in order to fully serve the transformational intention of the initiative and the research itself, we needed to expand our research framework mid-process. The framework that best serves the emergent and transformative nature of the initiative is one that both supports awareness-based action and generates widely applicable knowledge; that integrates a variety of perspectives on social phenomena (first-, second-, and third-person); and that aims to bring systematic inquiry both to the observable phenomena and the deeper underlying dimensions. The approach requires us to make visible our assumptions and to integrate and validate different epistemologies, including relational, intuitive and aesthetic knowing. As such, the approach to research we suggest here can be thought of as an epistemological framework itself.