Open Sources? A Commentary on ‘IS Research Methods: Inclusive Or Exclusive?’

Abstract

In their essay, Davison and Martinsons make a compelling argument for the information systems (IS) community to be more responsive to the ‘adverse consequences of epistemological and methodological monism’. Although there has always been a diversity of topics and theoretical orientations in the IS discipline (Culnan, 1986; Orlikowski and Baroudi, 1991), we still lack a plurality of research traditions to explore the IS phenomenon from multiple perspectives. Davison and Martinsons eloquently advance the call for such plurality. Their main argument is that the prevailing dominant perspective is unethical and produces less value to practice. These are important points. In this paper, we seek to complement their argument by reflecting not so much on methods as on the development of the wider IS field within which such methods are applied and ultimately legitimated. Our argument, in broad terms, is that the development of IS as a discipline faces important challenges that arise both from the domain of practice and from its own intellectual evolution. We see a greater plurality of methods as one strand in the discipline's ability to overcome these challenges. However, without changes in the wider discipline itself, such plurality risks becoming a token of diversity and not the driver for the more engaged and questioning scholarship that Davison and Martinsons advocate.