This article discusses the conduct and evaluatoin of interpretive research in information systems. While the conventions for evaluating information systems case studies conducted according to the natural science model of social science are now widely accepted, this is not the case for interpretive field studies. A set of principles for the conduct and evaluation of interpretive field research in information systems is proposed, along with their philosophical rationale. The usefulness of the principles is illustrated by evaluating three published interpretive field studies drawn from the IS research literature. The intention of the paper is to further reflect and debate on the important subject of grounding interpretive research methodology.

A set of principles for conducting and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems

Every year, around the time of the meetings of the American Anthropological Association, the New York Times asks a Big Name anthropologist to contribute an op-ed piece on the state of the field. These pieces tend to take a rather gloomy view. A few years ago, for example, Marvin Harris suggested that anthropology was being taken over by mystics, religious fanatics, and California cultists; that the meetings were dominated by panels on shamanism, witchcraft, and “abnormal phenomena”; and that “scientific papers based on empirical studies” had been willfully excluded from the program (Harris 1978). More recently, in a more sober tone, Eric Wolf suggested that the field of anthropology is coming apart. The sub-fields (and sub-sub-fields) are increasingly pursuing their specialized interests, losing contact with each other and with the whole. There is no longer a shared discourse, a shared set of terms to which all practitioners address themselves, a shared language we all, however idiosyncratically, speak (Wolf 1980).

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Theory in Anthropology since the Sixties

Questions about norm diffusion in world politics are not simply about whether and how ideas matter, but also which and whose ideas matter. Constructivist scholarship on norms tends to focus on “hard” cases of moral transformation in which “good” global norms prevail over the “bad” local beliefs and practices. But many local beliefs are themselves part of a legitimate normative order, which conditions the acceptance of foreign norms. Going beyond an existential notion of congruence, this article proposes a dynamic explanation of norm diffusion that describes how local agents reconstruct foreign norms to ensure the norms fit with the agents' cognitive priors and identities. Congruence building thus becomes key to acceptance. Localization, not wholesale acceptance or rejection, settles most cases of normative contestation. Comparing the impact of two transnational norms on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), this article shows that the variation in the norms' acceptance, indicated by the changes they produced in the goals and institutional apparatuses of the regional group, could be explained by the differential ability of local agents to reconstruct the norms to ensure a better fit with prior local norms, and the potential of the localized norm to enhance the appeal of some of their prior beliefs and institutions.I thank Peter Katzenstein, Jack Snyder, Chris Reus-Smit, Brian Job, Paul Evans, Iain Johnston, David Capie, Helen Nesadurai, Jeffrey Checkel, Kwa Chong Guan, Khong Yuen Foong, Anthony Milner, John Hobson, Etel Solingen, Michael Barnett, Richard Price, Martha Finnemore, and Frank Schimmelfennig for their comments on various earlier drafts of the article. This article is a revised version of a draft prepared for the American Political Science Association annual convention, San Francisco, 29 August–2 September 2001. Seminars on the article were offered at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University, in April 2001; the Modern Asia Seminar Series at Harvard University's Asia Center, in May 2001; the Department of International Relations, Australian National University, in September 2001; and the Institute of International Relations, University of British Columbia, in April 2002. I thank these institutions for their lively seminars offering invaluable feedback. I gratefully acknowledge valuable research assistance provided by Tan Ban Seng, Deborah Lee, and Karyn Wang at the Institute of Defence and Strategic Studies. I am also grateful to Harvard University Asia Centre and the Kennedy School's Asia Pacific Policy Program for fellowships to facilitate my research during 2000–2001.

http://www.rochelleterman.com/ir/sites/default/files/acharya%202004.pdf

How Ideas Spread: Whose Norms Matter? Norm Localization and Institutional Change in Asian Regionalism

According to service-dominant logic (S-D logic), all providers are service providers, and service is the fundamental basis of exchange. Value is co-created with customers and assessed on the basis of value-in-context. However, the extensive literature on S-D logic could benefit from paying explicit attention to the fact that both service exchange and value co-creation are influenced by social forces. The aim of this study is to expand understanding of service exchange and value co-creation by complementing these central aspects of S-D logic with key concepts from social construction theories (social structures, social systems, roles, positions, interactions, and reproduction of social structures). The study develops and describes a new framework for understanding how the concepts of service exchange and value co-creation are affected by recognizing that they are embedded in social systems. The study contends that value should be understood as value-in-social-context and that value is a social construction. Value co-creation is shaped by social forces, is reproduced in social structures, and can be asymmetric for the actors involved. Service exchanges are dynamic, and actors learn and change their roles within dynamic service systems.

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Expanding understanding of service exchange and value co-creation: a social construction approach

1. Introduction 2. Making language safe for science and society: from Francis Bacon to John Lock 3. Antiquaries and philologists: the construction of modernity and its others in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England 4. The critical foundations of national epic: Hugh Blair, the Ossian controversy, and the rhetoric of authenticity 5. Johann Gottfried Herder: language reform, das Volk, and the patriarchal state in eighteenth-century Germany 6. The Brothers Grimm: scientizing, textual production in the service of romantic nationalism 7. Henry Rowe school craft and the making of an American textual tradition 8. The foundation of all future researches: Franz Boas, George Hunt, Native American texts and the construction of modernity 9. Conclusion.

Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of Inequality

Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia.

Introduction - the origins of Hua-Ch'iao a short history of the Nanyang Chinese the limits of Nanyang Chinese nationalism, 1912-1937 the study of the Southeast Asian past Southeast Asia in the 9th and 14th centuries early Ming relations with Southeast Asia - a background essay China and Southeast Asia 1402-1424 the opening of relations between China and Malacca, 1403-1405 the first three rulers of Malacca the Melayu in Hai-Kuo Wen Chien Lu migration patterns in history - Malaysia and the region Malayan nationalism Malaysia - contending elites reflections of Malaysian elites traditional leadership in a new nation - the Chinese in Malaya and Singapore Chinese politics in Malaya a short introduction to Chinese writing in Malaya are Indonesian Chinese unique? - some observations trade and cultural values - Australia and the four dragons the life of William Liu - Australian and Chinese perspectives the compulsion to look south - Asian awareness of Australia on the south-eastern edge of Asia - an Asian view the China-Japan relationship - implications for Australia Asian perceptions of Australia - what Asians will see.

Fragmented Vision: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Malaysia

The narrative of Malay identity devised by Malay nationals, writers and filmmakers in the late colonial period associated Malayness with the village or kampung, envisaged as static, ethnically homogenous, rural, etc. Joel Kahn challenges the kampung version of Malayness, arguing that it ignores the immigration of Malays from outside the peninsula to participate in trade and commercial agriculture, the substantial Malay population in towns and cities, and the reformist Muslims who argued for a common bond in Islam. Owing to a rising dissatisfaction with the established order and new modernist sensitivies, especially among the younger generation, the author argues that it is time to revisit the alternative, more cosmopolitan narrative of Malayness.

Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World

Genealogie et evolution du concept de culture en anthropologie, de son insertion dans le cadre de l'anthropologie reflexive, et des proximites conceptuelles historiquement reperables entre culture et race, mais conclusion sur l'impossibilite (actuelle) de lui substituer un autre concept

Culture: Demise or Resurrection?

Contents: The Interpretation of Minangkabau Culture: Traditions of Modernity of Modernist Traditions? - Peasantization and Class Formation in Minangkabau Villages - The Constitution of Minangkabau in Colonial Discourse - Nationalism, Modernism, and Neotraditionalism: Discursive Transformation in Twentieth - Century Minangkabau Culture - Images of Tradition: the Selective Constitution of Minangkabau Culture - State Formation in Colonial Indonesia: Bureaucratization and Land Alienation and the Constitution of Minangkabau's Southern Frontier in the 1920s - The Hypertrophic Modern State, Culture and the Peasantry in Colonial Indonesia. 1993 314pp.

Joel S. Kahn

Papers

Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia.

Fragmented Vision: Culture and Politics in Contemporary Malaysia

Other Malays: Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in the Modern Malay World

Culture: Demise or Resurrection?

Constituting the Minangkabau: Peasants, Culture, and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia