Symbolic interactionist ethnography: implications for information systems research and practice

This paper attempts to contribute to the positivist-interpretivist and rigor-relevance debates in IS research. We accomplish this by reflecting on the implications of symbolic interactionist ethnography for enriching interpretive research, and by highlighting how the adaptation of the “constant comparison” technique from grounded theory may help move the ethnography study towards theoretical interpretation of symbolic interactions in varied IS research settings. In particular, we argue that the approach as outlined in this paper may effectively combine the theoretical strengths of the interactionist perspective with the empirical strengths of ethnography and the analytical edge of grounded theory. This approach may thus provide one starting point to help reconcile between the pursuit of academic knowledge vis-à-vis practice-oriented insights in IS research.