The Ontological, Epistemological and Methodological Debates in Information Systems Research: A Partial Review

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the ontological, epistemological and methodological debates in information systems (IS) research based on the philosophical assumptions in management and organisational research. IS as a discipline has had a lot of debates about having its own research tradition. A discipline need to have some fundamental and philosophical assumptions that informs the work of researchers in the discipline. The IS literature demonstrates the existence of philosophical assumptions in IS research though IS has come a long way from periods of pre-paradigmatism. Today, IS literature portrays the existence of four paradigms though some have been relatively older and more dominant than others. The four paradigms are the positivist, interpretivist, critical theory and the critical realism paradigms. Positivism has been very overly dominant from the early years of IS inception to the early 1990s when even interpretivism and critical theory were proposed as alternative paradigms in IS research. Critical realism is also gaining a lot of popularity in IS research though its application in the IS literature cannot be said to be a match to positivism. The ontological, epistemological and methodological assumptions of each of the four paradigms are discussed. A discussion of the research topic ‘Migrating processes from a traditional to a virtual environment: An application of process virtualisation theory to the Controller and Accountants General Department payroll services in Ghana’ is provided by justifying the ontological, epistemological and methodological stance of the paper to clearly elucidate its philosophical assumptions. This expatiates some the assumptions discussed under the paradigms in the paper.