Paper ID
3444
Paper Type
full
Description
Interpretivism in IS emerged in the 1980s. While at the time it presented an important alternative to positivism, the world has changed significantly since then, raising questions about its efficacy for IS relevant to the emerging world of ubiquitous IT. Some have suggested it should be abandoned because of its dualist inheritance from positivism. In this paper we explore a less radical approach of replacing the notion of interpretation at the heart of the approach with a non-dualist alternative. We explore how its problematic commitments to dualism, mentalism and individualism might be overcome by re-interpreting ‘interpretation’ using the holistic notions of ‘equipment’, ‘world’ and ‘being-in-the-world’ drawn from recent non-dualist work in IS. Such an ‘evolved’ interpretivism would retain key elements of the received view but repair others, allowing the existing acceptance and knowledge of interpretivism to be leveraged rather than replaced.
Recommended Citation
Riemer, Kai and Johnston, Robert B., "Wither Interpretivism? Re-interpreting interpretation to fit a world of ubiquitous ICT" (2019). ICIS 2019 Proceedings. 12.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/icis2019/research_methods/research_methods/12
Wither Interpretivism? Re-interpreting interpretation to fit a world of ubiquitous ICT
Interpretivism in IS emerged in the 1980s. While at the time it presented an important alternative to positivism, the world has changed significantly since then, raising questions about its efficacy for IS relevant to the emerging world of ubiquitous IT. Some have suggested it should be abandoned because of its dualist inheritance from positivism. In this paper we explore a less radical approach of replacing the notion of interpretation at the heart of the approach with a non-dualist alternative. We explore how its problematic commitments to dualism, mentalism and individualism might be overcome by re-interpreting ‘interpretation’ using the holistic notions of ‘equipment’, ‘world’ and ‘being-in-the-world’ drawn from recent non-dualist work in IS. Such an ‘evolved’ interpretivism would retain key elements of the received view but repair others, allowing the existing acceptance and knowledge of interpretivism to be leveraged rather than replaced.