Cultivating recalcitrance in information systems research

Abstract

There is an ongoing debate about how to improve the quality of empirical research efforts in information systems. One of the persistent issues within the debate concerns the relative importance of social and technical aspects of an information system and how to study these different elements. Contemporary research within science and technology studies suggests that social science inquiries can learnfrom empirical enquiries within the natural sciences through the notion of recalcitrance in experimental subjects. The aim of this article is to conduct an initial exploration of the usefolness of these ideas in the context of empirical information systems research. The following three research methods are subjected to a first theoretical analysis: (1) longitudinal, interpretive case study; (2) quantitative case study; and (3) laboratory experiments. For each of the three methods, an example is studied together with reflections from the researchers conducting the particular study. It is concluded that although this does not represent a solution to all methodological problems, adopting the perspective of cultivating recalcitrance and designing research methods toinclude objectors provides an additional perspective, which can enrich and deepen the empirical work as well as further qualify the methodology discourse between researchers. © 2001 by Springer Science+Business Media New York.