Critical realism is a subject of growing interest in the IS literature. This article aims at implementing a critical realist framework: Margaret Archer's (2003) internal conversation theory. As a contemporary sociologist, Archer suggests both a general vision of social practice and a typology of reflexivity modes. Her multilayered framework could be extremely useful in overcoming a current limi...

George Soros’s reflexivity theory is quite compatible with second order cybernetics. Indeed his work shows how to apply ideas in second order cybernetics to economics, finance, and political science. This paper briefly reviews three theories of reflexivity in cybernetics. It provides an introduction to Soros’s version of reflexivity theory and reviews applications in economics and finance. Soro...

In this article, we considered bidual spaces and reflexivity of real normed spaces. At first we proved some corollaries applying Hahn-Banach theorem and showed related theorems. In the second section, we proved the norm of dual spaces and defined the natural mapping, from real normed spaces to bidual spaces. We also proved some properties of this mapping. Next, we defined real normed space of R...

Faced with strong environmental issues, the agricultural sector has to revise deeply its aims and performance criteria. Numerous methods have been proposed to involve heterogeneous stakeholders in farming system design, and several authors highlight the importance of reflexivity in such projects. Our paper aims at strengthening this reflexivity by proposing a comparative analysis framework cont...

This paper explains the continuing relevance of Keynes’s philosophical thinking in terms of his anticipation of complexity thinking in economics. It argues that that reflexivity is a central feature of the philosophical foundations of complexity theory, and shows that Keynes employed an understanding of reflexivity in both his philosophical and economic thinking. This argument is first develope...

This paper presents the findings of an in-depth investigation of situated activities of developers and managers during an embedded system development. Previous empirical investigations claim that software design may involve activities outside the continuum of methodologies, such as improvisation or situated activities. Those activities may involve reflexive practices that are purposefully appli...

This paper examines the relationship between the Revue Olympique (monthly publication that first appeared in 1901), the Modern Olympic Movement and modern culture. Specifically, it demonstrates that the Revue Olympique provided a link between the ideology of the Modern Olympic Movement and the discourse of modernism. According to Art Herman (1994), modernism specifies a series of suppositions t...

We establish the algebraic reflexivity of three isometry groups of operator structures: The group of all surjective isometries on the unitary group, the group of all surjective isometries on the set of all positive invertible operators equipped with the Thompson metric, and the group of all surjective isometries on the general linear group of B(H), the operator algebra over a complex infinite d...

Qualitative research methods could help us to improve our understanding of medicine. Rather than thinking of qualitative and quantitative strategies as incompatible, they should be seen as complementary. Although procedures for textual interpretation differ from those of statistical analysis, because of the different type of data used and questions to be answered, the underlying principles are ...

Pierre Bourdieu’s “epistemic reflexivity” is the cornerstone of his intellectual enterprise, underpinning his claims to provide distinctive and scientific knowledge of the social world. This article considers what this notion offers for research and how it needs to be developed further to underpin progress in social science. Many reflexive research practices are sociological, individualistic, a...