We are the project councillors and are responsible for documentation and research in a joint project between the Norwegian Trade Unions (LO) and the Employers Association (NHO) to improve and modernise the automobile-and-electro trades as good working environment for skilled workers of both genders.

The project has targeted four participating counties and intends to recruit a selection of companies within the auto-and-electro trades in these counties. It is a prerequisite that the companies have a cooperation agreement with LO and NHO and employ, or have recently employed, female skilled workers. The participating companies then sign a contract with the principle parties.

The project has developed in that our efforts are concentrated on a county-wide company network and a women's network. In addition we organise half-yearly women's conferences on a national level.

Our task as project councillors and researchers is to create possibilities for this project, facilitate communication between networks, and documentation. We choose to use action research as a means of developing the most successful projects. Flyvbjerg (1993) argues in favour of using the most successful projects in social research rather than trying to pin down the overlying theories. These examples give a basis for further dialogue between practical change and existing theoretical perspectives (Winter 1989).

In our work with action research we emphasise two main approaches, the mainly Anglo-Saxon pedagogic action research (Stenhouse, McNiff and others) and the Scandinavian dialogue based action research (Moxnes, Pålshaugen and others). In previous action research projects we have used our own praxis as teachers and skilled workers as the basis of our research. In our present project we are still within our own trades, but with another role as researchers and new challenges in relation to influence and roles.

We wish to continue using elements from both these approaches, but have also been inspired by Nielsen, Nielsen and Olsen (1999) and Tofteng and Hustad (2006) who both represent a different approach where the emphasis is on maximising methods to  promote utopian visions. We have used these approaches in our work with the women's conferences as an aid to promoting the women's ambitions regarding improvements at work.

Our main challenges are securing the democratic processes for the participants, promoting the exchange of experience and factual knowledge, and ensuring that improvements are sustained and developed after the project is over.

In our coming paper we intend to show a more schematic model of  our project  in one county, in order to illuminate the above challenges. To make both the process and development more transparent we wish to develop an interview guide and conduct group interviews with a selection of the participants.

How the interviews are conducted to make the process more transparent and  democratic, to ensure possibilities for future improvements when the project closes, is the next question.