Ridiculous confusion

All I have to write is a couple of paragraphs about different ends of the belief spectrum of enquiry (ye wha'?!). Belief system - how you believe reality. It's about what you believe is real, what your assumptions are. It seems reasonable to surface those assumptions, because they influence what you believe you know, and therefore how you go about researching, and I need to explain why I researched it the way I researched it, to justify it.

Except, the belief spectrum of enquiry is full of paradigms, perspectives and isms.

• Positivism
• Realism
• Constructivism

And on top of those there's post-positivism (don't ask me if there's a negativism), critical realism and constructionism. I don't know the difference between constructivism and constructionism. I had thought my approach was constructionist, but now I'm confused and it might be that my ontology is constructionist and my methodology hermeneutically dialectic, though I thought this research was taking a critical realist research perspective because, although the organisation’s IS projects took place in real objective spaces, each individual participant constructed themselves in a particular way in relation to the project or programme setting. Which is they constructed themselves, so aren’t I working to a constructionist philosophy?
Now I have all these different terms to work with:

• approach
• ontology
• methodology
  
• perspective
• philosophy

This bit of my methodology chapter is never going to get writ.

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Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (2005). Paradigmatic controversies, contradictions and emerging confluences. In N. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), The Sage handbook of qualitative research (3 ed., Vol. 3). Thousand Oaks ;London: Sage Publications.

Stake on constructivism

Constructivism: the belief that knowledge is made up largely of social interpretation rather than awareness of external reality.

I have to nourish the belief that knowledge is constructed - that's the term Stake uses on page 99 'nourish'. It's an odd metaphor of food and nutrition - why do I have to nourish beliefs? Will beliefs starve without it? my research approach will wither and die without that belief. Why? Because my research approach is founded on the belief that people create and construct engagement between them. Engagement is not a given reality that everyone agrees on. the word itself has various meanings;

• engage - in a fight. See soldier who engaged with a gunman
• engage - take someone on in a contractual and legal arrangement - even a marriage is such an arrangement, hence a couple gets engaged.
• engage - a relationship that's positive and helpful, which is where I want to look

Without understanding and accepting these various understandings my research cannot progress. Therefore my research is founded on constructivism.

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Stake, R. E. (1995). Art of case study research, Sage.

Critical realism

I'm trying to understand the philosophical options that underpin my research. Two that may be relevant are

• critical realism
  
• social constructivism

Critical realism seems to be how things are in the world and the world is real, but there's still a distinction between the world of nature and the world of social. It's a natural world you can experiment with, analyse and measure; a social world has people who make up or construct concepts between them so the social world can't be controlled.

What's social constructivism in comparison?

Constructivism in information systems

Mingers writes and edits on social theory and philosophy in information systems. For example, on shaping of technology (SST) and the social construction of technology (SCOT) (sounds like a take-off of Berger & Luckmans 'Social construction of reality'). They criticise "the predominance of technological determinism" (page 332).

In Minger's book, Probert reviews Theodor Adono's work because it "assists the critical researcher in devising apposite research strategies". Probert comments:

"in Adono's view the subject does not make the world up (this is often termed 'constructivism')"

Constructivism is how a person understands the world, has made it up, has constructed it. It's a metaphor of building. These parts fit together, something cements them so that together they build something. Again in Mingers, Howcroft et al consider terminology indicating that constructivism includes strands:

• actor-network approach
• social constructivist approach
• social shaping approach
• systems approach.
  

But each strand causes debates. For example, they mention weak versus strong constructivism. I'd not read of the contrast before - so there's more for me to read up.

Mingers work is fascinating, enjoyable and relevant to IS in general. However, the research I'm doing is more about people, management and business than technology - it' s just that people and management are situated in a technology context - I'm not sure that technology influences the client-consultant relationship and therefore the literature on social theory and philosophy technology is not sufficiently relevant to my research.

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Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann (1971). The social construction of reality : a treatise in the sociology of knowledge. Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Mingers, J. and L. P. Willcocks, Eds. (2004). Social Theory and Philosophy for Information Systems. John Wiley Series in Information Systems, John Wiley.
"The phrase 'social theory and philosophy for information systems' invites an examination of following terms: social, theory, philosophy, information, systems, information systems, philosophy for information..." (more)

Knowledge creation, systems development

Supervisor #2 commented I should search on "knowledge creation" and "systems development". Seven papers came up including one by Jackson and Klobas, 2007. {Jackson, 2008 #1164}

Their paper is about building knowledge in projects. It attempts to apply a model of social constructivism to information systems development. The authors research IT projects, taking the view that for project communication to succeed, people need to ensure shared meanings are established to guide decisions and actions. The researchers aim to get project managers to realise that knowledge is shared understanding, gained through a process of continual sense-making and is a social process. They argue that an organising principle for ISD projects is to take an approach based on the philosophy and sociology of knowledge because the basic principle of understanding is a critical success factor in projects. They tabulate heuristics affecting knowledge sharing, derived from the literature. They list so many aspects that have already been researched that I can’t see what I can add. (Depressing) From 130 heuristics, they have created a survey tool for project managers to guide them in evaluating knowledge sharing in projects. They applied the model to twenty published case studies. To test the theoretical model, they guided users of the survey to rate the extent of which their project had each capability using a scale from one to ten, and to rate the importance of the capability to their project. That approach sounds positivist to me, so a bit contradictory to the paper title:

a practical application of social constructivism.

They conclude their proposed model of knowledge construction is a promising and practical tool for assessing knowledge management health of an ISD.

I have yet to work out how these authors' approach to knowledge fits into a situation that involves consultants as one of three parties in IT projects. And, I wonder how and if I should adapt my interview schedule so that I elicit more systems development and knowledge creation than I currently do.

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JACKSON, P. & KLOBAS, J. (2008) Building knowledge in projects: A practical application of social constructivism to information systems development. International Journal of Project Management, 26, 329-337.