What is Interpretive Research?

1
What is Interpretive Research?

• Geoff Walsham
• Lecture 1 of Course on Interpretive Research in
  IS - Oslo University

2
Contents of Lecture 1

• Definitions of interpretive research
• Views of data, ontology, knowledge and
  theory/practice link
• Philosophical traditions
• Current status in the IS literature
• Can interpretive research be critical?

3
A Definition (Orlikowski and Baroudi 1991)

• Interpretive studies assume that people create
  and associate their own subjective and
  intersubjective meanings as they interact with
  the world around them. Interpretive researchers
  thus attempt to understand phenomena through
  accessing the meanings participants assign to
  them

4
A Second Definition(Walsham 1993)

• Interpretive methods of research start from the
  position that our knowledge of reality, including
  the domain of human action, is a social
  construction by human actors and that this
  applies equally to researchers. Thus there is no
  objective reality which can be discovered by
  researchers and replicated by others, in contrast
  to the assumptions of positivist science

5
Interpretive View of Data(Geertz 1973)

• What we call our data are really our own
  constructions of other peoples constructions of
  what they and their compatriots are up to

6
Interpretive Ontology(Walsham 1995)

• Internal realism Reality-for-us is an
  inter-subjective construction of the shared human
  cognitive apparatus
• Subjective idealism Each person constructs his
  or her own reality

7
Interpretive View of Knowledge (Orlikowski and
Baroudi 1991)

• Social process is not captured in hypothetical
  deductions, covariances and degrees of freedom.
  Instead, understanding social process involves
  getting inside the world of those generating it

8
Theory and Practice(Orlikowski and Baroudi 1991)

• The interpretive research approach towards the
  relationship between theory and practice is that
  the researcher can never assume a value-neutral
  stance, and is always implicated in the phenomena
  being studied
• There is no direct access to reality unmediated
  by language and preconception

9
Some Philosophical Traditions Underpinning
Interpretive Research (Walsham 1995)

• Phenomenology e.g. Zuboff 1988
• Ethnomethodology e.g. Suchman 1987
• Hermeneutics e.g. Boland and Day 1989

10
Current Status of Interpretive Research in IS
Literature

• Better represented now compared to Orlikowski and
  Baroudis (1991) data
• Some interpretive articles in top journals such
  as MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research
  (although still a small minority)
• Information and Organization contains many
  interpretive studies
• Other IS journals publish interpretive studies
  European Journal of IS Scandinavian Journal of
  IS Information Society IT People etc.

11
Critical IS Research(Orlikowski and Baroudi 1991)

• Critically evaluate and transform the social
  reality under investigation
• Everything possesses an unfulfilled
  potentiality, and people, by recognizing these
  possibilities, can act to change their material
  and social circumstances
• The role of the researcher is to bring to
  consciousness the restrictive conditions of the
  status quo

12
Interpretive Versus Critical(Walsham 1993)

• The research described in this book has elements
  of both the interpretive and critical traditions
  and does not fit in one of these two categories
  theories, such as structuration theory, are
  indeed an attempt to dissolve the boundaries
  between such traditions, in emphasizing not only
  the importance of subjective meanings for the
  individual actor, but also the social structures
  which condition and enable such meanings and are
  constituted by them

13
My Current Position

• Research can be both interpretive and critical.
  Stronger critical emphasis comes from
• Motivation - what is wrong in the world rather
  than right
• Focus - on issues such as asymmetries of power
  relations
• Theory - with a critical edge e.g. Frankfurt
  school, Bourdieu, feminism, post-colonialism