Critical

I take a critical realist approach. Critical philosophy might be different. The "critical" of the critical realist is an answer to criticism of the totally positivist approach of a realist. Now I understand that my supervisor was telling me my approach is not philosophically critical. She's right, and I can still be a critical realist, can't I?

Critical realism is "a way of resolving or dissolving" issues around positivism and extreme constructivist positions {Mingers, 2004: 374}. "It's a response", says Mingers, "to the difficulty of maintaining a realist position in the face of criticisms" (page 380)

I understand that critical realism has strata: the real, the empirical and the actual, and I've tried to adapt Mingers diagram, above, to show how I think my research fits into these strata.

Yet Mingers addresses five criticisms of critical realism, and the fifth area is "the nature and extent of critical realism's claim to be 'critical'", which means "in the political sense of bringing about change in society" and that brings me back to my supervisor's argument that my work is not critical in that sense, the sense of challenging the status quo.

So oh dear! I'm arguing against myself. I have too little knowledge, enough to start arguing, but not enough to argue myself out of the spot my supervisor has put me in. Bother!

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Mingers, J. and Willcocks, L. P. (Eds.) (2004) Social Theory and Philosophy for Information Systems, John Wiley.

Not sociologically critical

Supervisor #2 reminds me about the Masters in Research Methods, course B852, where we studied a discussion of critical realism by Ackroyd and Fleetwood. I don't remember, then I realise that they published that difficult article on a metatheory of management by Tsoukas. My notes on it indicate how difficult I found it then.

Apparently I'm taking a critical view of the social world, not being sociologically critical and the "critical" refers to an epistemological stance rather than a theoretical or political stance. So that's all right then. I've changed my methodology chapter paragraph to read:

However, this research takes a realist perspective because, although IS projects take place in real objective spaces, each individual participant constructs themselves in a particular way in relation to the project setting. An advantage of such an approach is that “it maintains reality whilst still recognizing the inherent meaningfulness of social interaction" {Mingers, 2004:99}. Hence, engagement can be explored as a real phenomenon, whilst still recognising that IT project participants may be unaware of the phenomenon.

So I think I've kept what I said before, and now managed to justify it too.

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Tsoukas, H. (1994) 'What Is Management? An Outline of a Metatheory', British Journal of Management, 5 (4), pp. 289.

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?