The “University as bridge between technology and society” fills the role of interpreter of technology and trainer of technology skills, independent of the university’s other role to acculturate students into a technologically sophisticated culture. But the “bridge” metaphor is a logical positivist view that only captures the end result of dynamic decision-making processes. As a bridge, the evid...

Although Bohr’s reply to the EPR argument is supposed to be a watershed moment in the development of his philosophy of quantum theory, it is difficult to find a clear statement of the reply’s philosophical point. Moreover, some have claimed that the point is simply that Bohr is a radical positivist. In this paper, we show that such claims are unfounded. In particular, we give a mathematically r...

In the digital domain, music is usually studied from a positivist viewpoint, focusing on general ‘objective’ music descriptors. In this work, we strive to put music in a more social and cultural context, looking into ways to unify data analysis methods with thoughts from the humanities on musical meaning and significance. More specifically, we investigate whether information in collaborative we...

As part of a study to investigate the state of Information Systems research in Australia, a survey of the heads of all IS discipline groups in Australian universities was conducted in mid 2005. The study revealed a wide range of topics researched (with rapid growth in Electronic Commerce and Knowledge Management), a range of foci, a balance between positivist and interpretivist research, survey...

The beginnings of this story must go back to the time when we clinical practitioners, along with the rest of the scientific community, adopted positivism as the way that knowledge was constructed. A positivist approach emphasises “facts” as perceived by the five senses as the basis of empirical evidence. When these facts are shared by a community of “objective observers”, the common ground beco...

The literature indicates that three key social enablers—strong and committed leadership, open and honest communication, and a balanced and empowered implementation team—are necessary conditions/precursors for successful ERP implementation. In a longitudinal positivist case study, we find that, while all three enablers may contribute to ERP implementation success, only strong and committed leade...

In this research essay, we argue that IS researchers demonstrate a high degree of methodological exclusiveness in their preference for a relatively small selection of research methods that primarily follow the positivist tradition. Such exclusiveness is unethical because it severely and unreasonably limits the extent to which IS research and researchers can contribute both to pressing organisat...

This paper presents a meta-analysis of the CRIWG conference. The study is organized in three main sections: bibliometric analysis, analysis of references and subject analysis. The bibliometric analysis indicates that CRIWG is significantly above the average citation index of similar papers published in LNCS. The analysis of references shows a significant dependence on ACM papers and very low cr...

This article focuses on social representations of alternative medicines by a group of professors from the School of Medicine and health professionals from the public health system in the city of Campinas, São Paulo, basically physicians and nurses. The article also emphasizes personal trajectories by which these health professionals opted for a dissident theoretical and practical perspective vi...

This paper traces the development of technology as a discourse and as a way of understanding human activity. In our everyday activity, the notion of technology is often consumed by its purely practical, equipmental, interpretation. Such an interpretation assumes the cultural neutrality of technical things, fully justifying the equivocation of the technical with the technological. Since the 1950...