Conferred

The degree was conferred in absentia at the meeting of Congregation on 9 August 2011. I have the certificate.

Justifying my methodology

What's the relationship of realism to positivism and interpretivism?

thus asked my mock examiner. So I went back to reread Tsoukas (1994) on realist perspectives and have again sunk in the mire of methodological approaches, perspectives, philosophies and epistemologies.

This web site has a nice diagram of the overlap between the three approaches or perspectives or ontologies.

• Realism overlaps positivism in that it accepts social structures have independent existences. "Like positivism, realism accepts social structures have some form of independent existence that is experienced as ‘external' to individuals. These structures act upon us - pressurising and constraining our behaviour."
• Realism overlaps interpretivism in that what we regard as real is significant. "Like interpretivism, realism accepts that what we regard as real is highly significant. E.g. if I believe myself to be middle class, while every indicator of social class holds I am working class, this will have important consequences for my behaviour."

For my research on engagement,
social phenomena exist whether or not people are aware of them so engagement can be taken as a real phenomenon even if people are not aware of it. It still exists and affects their actions.

Critical realism is an epistemological (not a research or sociological) perspective that responds to critisism of the positivist perspective. "It's a response", says Mingers, "to the difficulty of maintaining a realist position in the face of criticisms" (page 380). My erudite supervisor tells me that

'the "critical" label comes from the associated idea that such "real" phenomena can however only be known through using conceptual frameworks, so our knowledge of these real phenomena is always provisional, or subject to challenge when new concepts come along. So knowledge of this real social world has to be held "critically".'

Critical realism is "a way of resolving or dissolving" issues around positivism and extreme constructivist positions {Mingers, 2004: 374}.

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Mingers, J. 2004. Real-Izing Information Systems: Critical Realism as an Underpinning Philosophy for Information Systems. Information and Organization, 14(2): 87-103.
Tsoukas, H. 1994. What Is Management? An Outline of a Metatheory. British Journal of Management, 5(4): 289.

Critical realism pondered

I think the term 'critical' is about responding to criticisms. In IS philosophy, according to John Mingers (2004), critical realism seems to be a response to criticisms of an empirical and naturalist view of science. Mingers says that the original aims of critical realism were

"(i) to re-establish a realist view of being in the ontological domain whilst accepting the relativism of knowledge as socially and historically conditioned in the epistemological domain; and
(ii) to argue for a critical naturalism in social science."

In a context where research has been of machines, of software, of hard systems with less of a focus on people, I can see how there might be a realist approach that was closer to positivism, and I'm finding it a fine line to distinguish between positivism and realism. I had the impression that critical realism was a step further away from positivism, and a compromise between positivist and constructionist approaches. I find support in Mingers' statement

"The major advantage of a critical realist approach is that it maintains reality whilst still recognizing the inherent meaningfulness of social interaction."

I like the idea that critical realists "want to get beneath the surface to understand and explain why things are as they are, to hypothesise the structures and mechanisms that shape observable events. "(p100) because that's the way I thought I was working, so I thought I was using a critical realist approach.

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Mingers, J. 2004. Real-Izing Information Systems: Critical Realism as an Underpinning Philosophy for Information Systems. Information and Organization, 14(2): 87-103. at http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6W7M-4C47BCF-4/2/873a061fe87e6979e71a48c3fe922ddd

Philosophical stance

Like a horse at a big jump, I'm stalled. For over a day, I have not written the ten paragraphs I want to write about my research philosophical stance, in my methodology chapter but have considered

• realism
• constructivism (what's the difference between constructionism and constructivism?)
• positivism

I had argued myself into believing I was taking a constructionist approach because I was seeing my informants as constructing themselves in the context of an IT project, that they constructed their relationships and how they engaged with each other. But now I think I'm taking a critical realist research perspective because although the organisation's IS project development took place in real objective space, each individual participant constructed them selves in a particular way in relations to the project or programme setting. That is critical realist, isn't it?