Since the 1950s the process of introducing information technology (IT) into work organizations has posed formidable challenges all too frequently resulting in reports of significant underperformance and failure. On closer inquiry it emerges that such poor outcomes are due, in no small way, to a distinct inability to effect an integrated approach to change, an approach that concurrently attends ...

It has been argued that positivist and constructivist ontologies are irreconcilable. According to LINCOLN and GUBA (2000), positivism’s "naive realism" holds that reality is both "real" and "apprehendable," whereas constructivism maintains that meaning is generated by individuals and groups. This analysis implies that the quantitative and qualitative methodologies associated with positivism and...

This paper discusses adequacy as to the application of Brazilian guidelines, Resolution 196/96(1) and complementaries to qualitative health researches, considering that these are based on non-positivistic paradigms. Frequently, decisions about the research are made together with the studied community. There is a concern with justice and social change. And, since subjectivity can be considered t...

Traditional premises in archival theory and practice hold that archival records are authentic as to procedure and impartial as to creation because they are created as a means for, and as a by-product of, action, and not for the sake of posterity. Such Positivist assumptions about the nature of records have come under sustained scrutiny in the archival literature over the past decade. The post-P...

This reflection by a qualitative researcher stems from concrete experience with data handling in funded research project. The followed Open Research Data guidelines and found optimal solutions to pseudonymise data, but this later evolved into deep epistemological questioning on praxis. During the first phase of project, tailor-made software was developed help librarians an IT professional autom...

AIM This paper targets novice nurse researchers to highlight how the perspectives of human sciences are useful in understanding people's experiences. BACKGROUND There is a need to address the utility of human sciences or the humanistic philosophy that values the understanding of subjective experiences in nursing, given that the mainstream development of nursing knowledge is still influenced b...

Using Academic Search Complete, we sought out any published action research articles taking positivist and/or statistical approaches in the information systems discipline. We searched articles in the Senior Scholars Basket of 8 (MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Journal of Management Information Systems, Journal of Information Techn...

Many recent articles from within the information systems (IS) arena present an old-fashioned view of realism. For example, Iivari, Hirschheim, and Klein (1998) saw classical realism as seeing “data as describing objective facts, information systems as consisting of technological structures (‘hardware’), human beings as subject to causal laws (determinism), and organizations as relatively stable...

This article was inspired by participant observation of a contemporary collaboration between empirically oriented philosophers of mind and neuroscientists. An encounter between this anthropologist of science and neurophilosophers in a Finnish sleep laboratory led to the following philosophical exploration of the intellectual space shared by neurophilosophy and science studies. Since these field...