Enabling a Kleinian integration of interpretivist and socio-critical IS research: the contribution of Dooyeweerd's philosophy

This paper suggests how interpretivist, socio-critical and positivist approaches in information systems research might be integrated. Heinz Klein's approach to information systems was a significant advance on earlier ones, bringing together a number of issues discussed in interpretivist and socio-critical circles, with philosophical groundings. He believed IS research would benefit from integration of interpretivist and socio-critical approaches, but found no philosophical grounding for this. Interpretivism's reluctance to consider normativity might be a 'Trojan horse' that undermines integration. This paper employs Dooyeweerd's philosophy to expose and expel the Trojan horse and sketch how a philosophically-grounded integration of interpretivist, socio-critical and even positivist approaches might proceed.