Critical Realism: A Preferred Approach to Research on Design, Development, and Use of ICT-based Information Systems?

摘要

Different types of "postmodern" approaches have gained popularity in IS-research. Since most of them have a flat treatment of the agency/structure dimension, they focus exclusively on micro phenomena, and reject objectivist elements they are problematic to use in IS-research. An alternative approach is critical realism, which suggests, for example, that social reality is not simply composed of agents' meanings, but that there exist structural factors influencing agents' lived experiences. The paper presents critical realism and Layder's adaptive theory and exemplifies how they can be used in IS-research.