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Relating research to practice: imperative or circumstance?

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Abstract

This paper provides a starting point for thinking beyond a research–practice divide and discusses possible new conceptualizations of intervention and the role of IT research in contemporary organizational settings. ‘IT research’ denotes a conglomerate of overlapping research conducted under the headings of Information Systems, Systems Development, Critical IS Research and Participatory Design. The paper applies this joint notion of IT research and the IT researcher to draw parallels across these niches of research regarding the question of intervention. Through an analysis of selected field study events, a prominent notion of intervention (as being active as opposed to being passive) is reworked in terms of intervention as circumstance, a circumstantial interplay of situated practices. In closing, subsequent possibilities for repositioning the IT researcher are discussed in terms of reflexivity, facilitation or being a trickster.

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Notes

  1. These distinctions are prominent and somewhat unquestioned. Yet this crude list does not account for the entirety of the intersecting fields mentioned above. Exceptions include Markussen (1994, 1996), Büscher et al. (2001), Zuiderent (2002) and Boland and Lyytinen (2004), which will be drawn into this paper in the analysis section

  2. See also Stolterman (1991) who makes a similar point based on the empirical study of professional design work and the ‘hidden rationality’ behind designers’ examination of work areas to be supported by IT.

  3. In other interviews, discussions of ProjectWeb likewise constantly slipped into talking about what it might bring. Wonderful future scenarios and possibilities continued to emerge, not only from me, but also from the interviewees. Interviewees would often explain what one could do or what one might use ProjectWeb for and tell elaborate stories about how other people used ProjectWeb elsewhere (Henriksen 2003). What is happening here is not as simple as saying that the enactment belongs to research or that the intervention is something I bring in and impose on that which I am studying. Who is intervening in what becomes a messy question and can best be understood as a mutual enactment—an effect of the situation where interviewees also participate in creating a space for intervention.

  4. Suchman (1995) and Star and Strauss (1999) discuss the notion of ‘making invisible work visible’ and present some of the tensions and trade-offs involved in attempts to value invisible work through formal task descriptions: how these also may reify work, become opportunities for surveillance, increase work burdens, and perhaps weaken the creative processes that are the target of support.

  5. Boland and Lyytinen rely on structuration theory to explicate this process of continual interference and enactment. Drawing on Giddens (1984) process is explicated as a multilayered and continuous structuration process through which the world studied in research practice is also (re)designed. For a discussion of the parallels and differences of the enactment concept in structuration theory and an STS notion of enactment, see Henriksen (2003).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the people who participated in this study at Novo Nordisk and Jeannette Pols, Jens Pors and Lucy Suchman for comments to the first analysis this paper builds upon. Thanks are due also to reviewers for their very useful comments and suggestions.

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  1. Department of Design and Use of Information Technology, IT University of Copenhagen, Rued Langgaards Vej 7, 2300, Copenhagen S, Denmark

    Dixi Louise Strand

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Strand, D.L. Relating research to practice: imperative or circumstance?. AI & Soc 20, 420–441 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-006-0047-4

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