Research philosophies in the IOS adoption field

This paper pursues two objectives. First it depicts the status of research philosophies of the IOS adoption field. Second, it gives an overview of the discussions within the field of IS about interrelating research philosophies and analyzes to which extent this has happened in the IOS adoption field thus far. In depicting the philosophical status of the field we apply Orlikowski and Baroudi’s (1991) framework that classifies IS research as relying on a foundation of assumptions from either positivism, interpretivism or critical theory. We found the framework well suited for our review of the field, although we did not find any instances where critical theory had been used as the basic assumption in an IOS adoption study. Our findings show that there are several clear openings for contributions that apply new research perspectives to the field of IOS or combine multiple research perspectives for added insight into the dynamics of IOS adoption.