Matt Germonprez

Pluralist action research: a review of the information systems literature*

Action research (AR) has for many years been promoted and practised as one way to conduct field studies within the information systems (IS) discipline. Based on a review of articles published in leading journals, we explore how IS researchers practise AR. Our review suggests that AR lends itself strongly towards pluralist approaches which facilitate the production of both theoretical and practical knowledge. First, on the level of each study we analyse how research and problem‐solving activities are mixed, in three ways: the research dominant, the problem‐solving dominant and the interactive approaches. Second, in the context of the wider research programme in which the study is situated, we analyse how AR is mixed with other research methods, in two ways: the dominant and the sequential approaches. We argue that these pluralist practices of mixing types of research activities and types of research methods provide IS action researchers with a rich portfolio of approaches to knowledge production. This portfolio helps them address the risks involved in AR to ensure their efforts contribute to the literature as well as to practical problem‐solving.

Style composition in action research publication

Examining action research publications in leading Information Systems journals as a particular genre of research communication, we develop the notion of style composition to understand how authors structure their arguments for a research contribution. We define style composition as the activity through which authors select, emphasize, and present elements of their research to establish premises, develop inferences, and present contributions in publications. Drawing on this general notion, we identify a set of styles that is characteristic of how IS action researchers compose their argument. Premise styles relate to the dual goals of action research through practical or theoretical positioning of the argument; inference styles combine insights from the problem-solving and the research cycles through inductive or deductive reasoning; and contribution styles focus on different types of contributions--experience report, field study, theoretical development, problemsolving method, and research method. Based on the considered sample, we analyze the styles adopted in selected publications and show that authors have favored certain styles while leaving others underexplored; further, we reveal important strengths and weaknesses in the composition of styles within the IS discipline. Based on these insights, we discuss how action research practices and writing can be improved, as well as how to further develop style compositions to support the publication of engaged scholarship research.

Explanation in information systems

Abstract.  Explanation of observed phenomena is a major objective of both those who conduct and those who apply research in information systems (IS). Whereas explanation based on the statistical relationship between independent and dependent variables is a common outcome of explanatory IS research, philosophers of science disagree about whether statistical relationships are the sole basis for the explanation of phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an expanded concept of explanation into the realm of IS research. We present a framework based on the four principle explanation types defined in modern philosophy: covering‐law explanation, statistical‐relevance explanation, contrast‐class explanation and functional explanation. A well‐established research stream, media richness, is used to illustrate how the different explanation types complement each other in increasing comprehension of the phenomenon. This framework underlies our argument that explanatory pluralism can be used to broaden research perspectives and increase scientific comprehension of IS phenomena above and beyond the methodological and ontological pluralism currently in use in IS research.

Member engagement within digitally enabled social network communities: New methodological considerations

Digitally enabled social networks (DESN) are a complex assemblage of engagement, reflection, action, technology, organization and community. DESN create a unique challenge for researchers who aim to understand what social networks are, what they can become and what enablers and constraints underlie trajectories of member engagement. As DESN continually evolve, knowing them as stable and reified representations or as mere technology artefacts provides a limited understanding of their complexity and emergent properties. While DESN are, in part, the technology that supports the necessary actions for engagement, they are also the people and behaviours that constitute its community. Through the presentation of new methodological considerations towards Digg, a large DESN, we observe that social networks entail practices of engagement, change and evolution within a DESN community. We reveal how engagement is a communal endeavour and that the clash of socio‐technical trajectories can result in the emergence of new paths of member participation. Our findings demonstrate the potential of netnography and impressionist tales for contributing to the ongoing pluralistic investigations of DESN and also inform research on engagement and community design and change.

Task, technology, and tailoring in communicative action: An in-depth analysis of group communication

Communication is fundamental to team work and it occurs increasingly often in a technology-mediated environment. Understanding how communication evolves in such environments is essential to ensuring that the right technology is provided for whatever task a group needs to accomplish, even if it is not precisely known how the technology is going to be used. With the growing body of research on different tools for supporting computer-mediated groups, we still have much to learn about how communication evolves, where potential breakdowns occur, and how groups tailor technology during the communication process. This paper addresses these important issues by providing an in-depth analysis of two-person dyads that communicated over a web-based set of collaboration tools during a 6-week project. We analyze communication through the lens of communicative action theory, showing how social action unfolds during communication and how groups challenge and resolve validity claims in different task-technology environments. This study contributes by exploring group processes, developing and applying group communication analysis tools, and enhancing theorizing on technology tailoring.

Open source communities of competitors

operating system did not evolve from an existing code stream there was little to no corporate participation. The code base and community practices were simply not mature enough for integration into commercial products. As the community matured, corporations began to realize its value and started contributing toward the advancement of both corporate and open source initiatives. Linux distributions (e.g., RedHat, Ubuntu, SuSe) evolved to ease installation and ongoing management. Server vendors (e.g., IBM and Hewlett-Packard) joined to drive stability and performance enhancements into the kernel. Such involvements improved both the development economics and community maturity, reinforcing the motivations for corporations to Throughout the 1990s, corporations involved in the design of software services viewed open source participation with skepticism. However, over the past 15 years, corporate participation in open source communities has expanded rapidly. It is no longer unusual for Fortune 500 companies to have full-time staff dedicated to leveraging open source for corporate profit. Corporate participation in open source communities has raised interesting and complicated questions about how the requirements of volunteer and for-profit contributors evolve in collaborative environments. The Linux community offers a classic example of an evolution toward corporate participation in open source. Linux began as a student project. Its earliest community members were largely veteran Open Source Communities of Competitors

Reflecting, Tinkering, and Tailoring: Implications for Theories of Information System Design

The design and embedding of technical artifacts in complex task, social, and organizational environments is fundamental to IS. Yet in Design Science Research (DSR) and in the information system development process, the role of the humans who will use the system has been marginalized to that of a source in a requirements elicitation process, a subject in participatory design, or worse, a “user” of the designed technological artifact (Bannon 1991). While recent research (Kensing et al. 1998; Kensing and Blomberg 1998; Grudin and Pruitt 2002) has positioned end-users as participants involved in the design process, this work has largely focused on the primary design phase of technology artifacts. We have not seen a conscious, research driven approach which posits people as free, intelligent, and intentional designers in the ongoing recreation of information systems through a process of secondary design in the context of use. The hegemony of artifact design is so strong that workers’ deviation from prescribed uses of information systems and the creation of workarounds is frequently viewed as resistance (Ferneley and Sobreperez 2006) rather than as a secondary design process to tailor a system to fit the user’s situated tasks, metaphors, and use patterns. Although a number of recent special journal issues have addressed Design Science Research, few researchers focus attention on the activities of the humans using the systems. Nowhere is the human actor considered a designer in her own right. Yet an increasing number of technologies are intended to be tailored for the creation of information environments, where actors in the information process reflect on the context, tasks, and technologies to tinker with the system and tailor it to suit their own metaphors and use patterns (Germonprez et al. 2007).

A Theory of Responsive Design: A Field Study of Corporate Engagement with Open Source Communities

Although our general knowledge about open source communities is extensive, we are only beginning to understand the increasingly common practices by which corporations design software through engagement with these communities. In response, we combine design theorizing with field-study research (1) to analyze rich qualitative data from over 40 corporations participating in the Linux open source community and (2) to synthesize the observed corporate-open source community engagements into a new type of information systems design theory that we call responsive design. Empirically, we document how corporate participants in these contexts respond to market decisions, interdependent ideologies, and distributed relationships by continuously establishing and maintaining connections with community members; connections that stem from the social and material rules inherent in the open source community. Based on these observations, we create the theory of responsive design as a particular form of corporate software des...

Introduction: human-computer interaction studies in information systems

The guest editors are grateful to the DATA BASE editors-in-chief, Thomas Stafford and Patrick Y.K. Chau, for this opportunity and their strong support of this AIS SIGHCI-sponsored special issue on HCI studies in IS. The guest editors also thank the following reviewers who have played an important role in the development of the manuscripts included in this special issue: Alanah Davis, Haiyan Fan, Andrew Hardin, Jakob Iversen, Xin Li, Sherrie Komiak, Eleanor Loiacono, Tomasz Miaskiewicz, John Murphy, Lorne Olfman, Veena Parboteeah, Robin Poston, Shu Schiller, Nikhil Srinivasan, Heshan Sun, Nan Sun, Peter Tarasewich, Jason Thatcher, Chelley Vician, Dezhi Wu, and Jie Yang. Background

The Potential for Citizen Science in Information Systems Research

In this paper, we explicate citizen science in information systems research. Citizen science in IS research is a partnership between IS researchers and people in their everyday lives. Citizen science projects in the IS field are defined by phenomenon that interest both citizens and scientists and by the intervention of citizens in scientific processes for the purposes of scientific literacy and a more informed citizenry. We make the case for citizen science as part of a movement in IS research towards societally impactful research at the confluence of human behavior, technology, society, and environmental sustainability. We discuss the origins of citizen involvement in science and contemporary notions of citizen science from sociological, natural science, and public policy perspectives to build a working definition for the IS field. We provide examples of how one can leverage citizen science in IS research and discuss larger ideas for the possibility of citizen science.