Critical Realism in Information Systems Research

The Role of Information Quality in Healthcare Organizations: A Multi-Disciplinary Literature Review

“…The notion of 'critical' in CR is to be understood as epistemological relativity [39], thus having direct consequences for the methodology chosen (i.e., by valuing paradigmatic diversification). The methodology used in this research is primarily based on the work of Okoli [43,44], where the goal is to identify relevant literature and record the phenomena observed in a wide area of existing research (i.e., theory landscaping).…”

“…Practical screening (not to be confused with quality appraisal) sets the practical boundaries of the search process. An important factor in critical realism is epistemological relativity, i.e., all viewpoints are equally valid [39]. Thus, no practical screening criteria was employed concerning journal rankings, field of research (multi-disciplinary approach), outlet (journals, conference proceedings, books, practitioner publications, grey literature), research paradigms (positivistic, interpretive, conceptual etc.…”

Symbolic Action Research in Information Systems: Introduction to the Special Issue

“…The most popular ones now are probably affordance theory (Faraj et al 2011) and sociomateriality (Orlikowski and Scott 2008). Also, critical realists have recently offered their interpretation of how information systems, symbols, and action relate (Mingers et al 2013;Mingers and Willcocks 2014). These developments share ontological and epistemological common ground with the symbolic action perspective including an action orientation and postpositivistic epistemology.…”

Helping business schools engage with real problems: The contribution of critical realism and systems thinking

“…This is largely because it promises a way out of the sterile standoff between positivism and constructionism/ interpretivism (and later post-modernism/ post-structuralism) that has so dominated the field and led, in part, to the problems discussed above (Fleetwood and Ackroyd 2004;Kilduff et al 2011;Mingers 2004b;Reed 1997;2009a). CR has been proposed and discussed within particular subject areas, e.g., operational research ( And it has also been proposed specifically to address the rigour/relevance issue that is of concern in this paper (Hodgkinson and Starkey 2011;Syed et al 2009;Willmott 2012).…”

“…It links in to each of the other components of the approach as a whole: it is intrinsically systemic and transdisciplinary; it validates a mixed-methods research approach; and it has strong critical and ethical commitments. There are, of course, some criticisms and debates about critical realism -see for example Willmott (2005;, Contu and Willmott (2005), Al-Amoudi and Willmott (2011), Mir and Watson (2001) and (Mingers 2004b).…”