Cultivating Recalcitrance in Information Systems Research

There is an ongoing debate about how to improve the quality of empirical research efforts in information systems. One of the persistent issues within the debate concerns the relative importance of social and technical aspects of an information system and how to study these different elements. Contemporaryresearchwithinscienceandtechnologystudiessuggests that social science inquiries can learn from empirical enquiries within the natural sciences through the notion of recalcitrance in experimental subjects. The aim of this article is to conduct an initial exploration of the usefulness of these ideas in the context of empirical information systems research. The following three research methods are subjected to a first theoretical analysis: (1) longitudinal, interpretive case study; (2) quantitative case study; and (3) laboratory experiments. For each of the three methods, an example is studied together with reflections from the researchers conducting the particular study. It is concluded...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2001
• Where: IFIP
• Authors: Carsten Sørensen, Edgar A. Whitley, Shirin Madon, Dasha Klyachko, Ian Hosein, Justine Johnstone
• Keywords: Case Study, Empirical Research Efforts, IFIP 2001, Information Systems, Programming Languages