Using social theory to make sense of IS: what’s it all about?

Citation

Shoib, G. and Nandhakumar, J. (2009), "Using social theory to make sense of IS: what’s it all about?", Information Technology & People, Vol. 22 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2009.16122aaa.001

Using social theory to make sense of IS: what’s it all about?

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Information Technology & People, Volume 22, Issue 1

In the spirit of this special issue we, the Guest Editors, will present our editorial as a series of reflections on:

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  our motivations and journey to the special issue idea;

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  how our motivations were translated into the CfP;

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  what we received on the whole as submissions and the review process;

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  the accepted papers and their interpretations of the task set out in the CfP and their contributions; and

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  the overall contribution of the special issue.

By educational background and training we are both, not unlike many of our contemporary colleagues, “scientists”. Gamila’s undergraduate degree was in Computer Science and qualified her as a Software Engineer. Her Master’s was in Computer Speech and Language Processing. Joe’s undergraduate degree was in Management Science. Our first encounter and experiences with interpretive information systems, social theory and qualitative research was in the arena of the Judge Institute of Management Studies, as it was previously known, at the University of Cambridge, albeit several years apart. We were converted and initiated into this “new” world ar the hand of our PhD supervisor, Matthew Jones, as well as the father of interpretive Information Systems, Geoff Walsham. Philosophy, sociology and qualitative research methods books appeared on our bookshelves next to software engineering, algorithms, systems development methodologies and programming languages.

Our professional worlds had been up to that point made up of facts, certainties and techniques for accurately obtaining and representing the truth. These were soon replaced by multiple socially constructed world-views made up of interpretations. Our work tools and techniques for attaining knowledge were also replaced by interpretations (of interpretations). Likewise, our outputs and contribution to knowledge consisted of interpretations. Certainty and confidence (in our) knowledge was replaced by a healthy openness to ambiguity and critical cynicism and scepticism regarding established truths. Reflexivity and self-doubt propelled us deeper into this seemingly unstructured world. How did we know what we knew? What is legitimate knowledge? How do our research subjects and colleagues come to know what they knew? How can we tap into this subjective knowledge of our research subjects? How do we represent what we have learnt from our studies? What makes an account more believable or trustworthy than another? And so on. These were some of the questions that preoccupied not just us as PhD students undergoing an epistemological conversion, but also as active new members of a new vibrant emerging body of academics trying to counter the mainstream of positivist, quantitative, technology-focussed, socially indifferent research in our discipline.

Giddens’s Structuration Theory (Giddens, 1984), Kling’s Web Models (Kling and Scacchi, 1982; Kling, 1987), and Latour, Callon and Law’s Actor-Network-Theory (Callon and Latour, 1981; Law, 1999) were some of the key intellectual influences that had, through a variety of personal relationships between members of our intellectual circle and the inceptors of those theories, made their way into our repertoire of concepts and ideas that could be helpful for making sense of not only information systems but also the multiple worlds that we found ourselves constructing and deconstructing. Their promise and attraction lay in their scaffolding potential not only for the worlds we were building but also for our “new” qualitative and interpretive approaches to construction. They could offer us solid and legitimate design techniques and building blocks which we could use to create legitimate, realistic and coherent worlds. This potential was made even more attractive by the ongoing epistemological conversion process which had pulled the carpet from under our feet and left us grappling with ambiguity, uncertainty and doubt on all levels.

Not surprisingly, we were not the only ones undergoing this transformation. These social theories, with their promise of certainty, became more and more appealing to the increasing body of interpretive IS researchers who were themselves also seeking legitimacy, intellectual anchorage and recognition by the academic community at large. Two decades on from these defining beginnings, the tear-away group of interpretive IS researchers appears to have acquired both, with social theories as, one could argue, a given feature of their landscape (see, for example, Jones and Karsten’ (2008) review of social theory in IS research). One danger of this “becoming established” is taking things for granted, becoming distant from the meanings of things, no longer questioning why things are they way they are and no longer explicitly thinking about them or taking them into account. As journal and conference paper reviewers and editors as well as PhD supervisors, we have, over the years, seen more and more IS researchers following in this tradition of using social theory, albeit with a number of worrying characteristics that promulgate the above dangers:

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  a decreasing acquaintance with the writings of the inceptors of the theory; and consequently:

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  shallow understanding of the theory, its origins, spirit and intentions; often resulting in:

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  a selective out-of-context usage of small sets of a theory’s concepts and ideas; which in turn often results in:

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  a violation of the original theory’s spirit and intended meanings.

Alongside this briefly presented evolution of interpretive IS and social theory has emerged a very similar trajectory of IS and qualitative research, where the latter have become the research methods of choice par excellence. Like social theories, qualitative research methods have a history that is much older than that of our young IS discipline (if we take it to date back to the early 1990s). Consequently, and more so than the use of social theories in IS, they have also been reified into a “research tradition” and reduced to labels used in well established “formulae” that describe, rationalise and legitimise the design of our research studies.

Our motivation for this special issue can thus be described as taking us back to our beginnings, opening up the boxes that have been blackened and conveniently labelled and in so doing reminding ourselves of what it was all about, sharing the details and messiness with our new generation of interpretive IS researchers and unleashing the potential for learning and discovering things we may have too readily dismissed or forgotten in the past.

Our CfP thus reflected our motivations and requested that authors submit honest, detailed and reflexive accounts of their usage of social theory in their IS research. We urged them to use simple, accessible language, to avoid excessive use of labels and cross-referencing, to explain what they mean using their own words, and to share their happinesses as well as their disenchantments with social theory.

We received 20 papers covering a multitude of social theories. The six papers selected for inclusion, in addition to meeting the CfP criteria, reflected a range of those theories in use in our field and provided accounts that we deemed to be potentially useful to our special issue’s audience. Unexpected, but very welcome, was also the epistemological variety of researcher stances.

By far the most challenging, for us as well as the authors, of our CfP criteria proved to be the restriction on the number of references and the use of accessible simple language. Using our own words to describe what we mean and offering our own well-founded views and opinions is something that our established publishing traditions appear to have drowned out. A personal account appears to unfortunately be at the very low end of the legitimate accounts scale. In the absence of cross-references, how do we legitimise our arguments? In the absence of labels, we are forced to better know and understand the meanings so as to be able to re-present them and incorporate them into our own views and arguments. What we ended up with was a middle ground where authors did refer to original ideas and labels but were obliged to re-present them in their own words and explain them. The second challenge seemed to be the “operationalisation” of reflexivity. Some authors, in the review process, gave too much of themselves and not enough of the research process. Others focused almost entirely on the process and bracketed themselves out of it all. Finding a balance between the two extremes and finding ways for usefully structuring and presenting our reflections to others thus emerges as an area for in need of further attention by the IS community. The long traditions of eliminating bias and objectivity that have for so long been entrenched into our consciousness as “scientists” are partly to blame. Inspiration could come from disciplines that encourage self-emersion and expression such as the arts. We, as interpretive IS researchers, need to be as comfortable with our “new” approaches in the same way that the discipline, as a whole, needs to come to terms with pluralism and multiple forms of approach, expression and representation. Finally, most telling of all was the fact that with the initial submissions we received very personal notes from most of the issue’s contributors thanking us for challenging the norms and attempting to “break free” from them. They said they felt inspired and enjoyed writing their papers, which were different, regardless of whether or not they would be accepted in the final issue. This difference was, however, also a cause of distress for a minority who were concerned and later disgruntled that they had made extra effort for our issue but would not be able to submit their papers elsewhere if rejected. In our minds the latter reflects the death of scholarship in academia where publishing is no longer a matter of sharing interesting and useful research and promoting scholarship, but a means to career advancement and promotion. This again confirmed the belief that more effort was needed to promote scholarship as opposed to simply research and to that effect challenge the publication and promotion machinery that is stifling the intellectual advancement of our discipline, like so many others.

The Special Issue thus provides the reader with a range of different stories to inspire and comfort him/her in the course of our joint quest for acceptance in the game of academic research and publication. Mitev’s account shares her experience with Actor-Network Theory over the years. Richardson reflects on her journey with Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology. Wagner and Ramiller’s essay supplements Actor-Network Theory with the useful notion of “surprise”. Rowlands gives us a detailed example of applying Lamb and Kling’s social actor model to the traditional notion of a “user”. Currie puts institutional theory and its usage in the IS field under scrutiny. Davern and Watkins provide a very honest and enlightening account of using Adaptive Structuration Theory, including their struggle as positivists in a predominantly interpretive terrain.

The review process and the special issue on the whole thus confirmed our conclusion that action was needed to rectify the status quo and counter the dangers of reified research traditions, old and new. It also made us, editors and authors alike, very much aware of the implications and limitations of the way we have come to do research: the language we use, the formats we (blindly) follow, the rationales we offer and the comfort zones that we have thus established for ourselves. It probably takes more than one special issue to achieve subversive aims. We hope, however, to have, to use some of Giddens’s terms, “sown some seeds of change” that could potentially subvert the “established ways of doing things”, ironically brought about through the well established modality of a special issue.

We hope you enjoy this special issue as much as we and the authors have enjoyed putting it together,

Gamila ShoibSchool of ICT, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia

Joe NandhakumarWarwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK