Introduction Positivism The March of Science Constructionism The Making of Meaning Interpretivism For and against Culture Interpretivism The Way of Hermeneutics Critical Inquiry The Marxist Heritage Critical Inquiry Contemporary Critics and Contemporary Critique Feminism Re-Visioning the Man-Made World Postmodernism Crisis of Confidence or Moment of Truth? Conclusion

The Foundations of Social Research: Meaning and Perspective in the Research Process

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

Counseling psychologists face many approaches from which to choose when they conduct a qualitative research study. This article focuses on the processes of selecting, contrasting, and implementing five different qualitative approaches. Based on an extended example related to test interpretation by counselors, clients, and communities, this article provides a detailed discussion about five qualitative approaches— narrative research; case study research; grounded theory; phenomenology; and participatory action research—as alternative qualitative procedures useful in understanding test interpretation. For each approach, the authors offer perspectives about historical origins, definition, variants, and the procedures of research.

Qualitative Research Designs: Selection and Implementation

Knowledge-intensive firms are composed of multiple communities with specialized expertise, and are often characterized by lateral rather than hierarchical organizational forms. We argue that producing knowledge to create innovative products and processes in such firms requires the ability to make strong perspectives within a community, as well as the ability to take the perspective of another into account. We present models of language, communication and cognition that can assist in the design of electronic communication systems for perspective making and perspective taking. By appreciating how communication is both like a language game played in a local community and also like a transmission of messages through a conduit, and by appreciating how cognition includes a capacity to narrativize our experience as well as a capacity to process information, we identify some guidelines for designing electronic communication systems to support knowledge work. The communication systems we propose emphasize that narratives can help construct strong perspectives within a community of knowing, and that reflecting upon and representing that perspective can create boundary objects which allow for perspective taking between communities. We conclude by describing our vision of an idealized knowledge intensive firm with a strong culture of perspective making and perspective taking, and by identifying some elements of the electronic communication systems we would expect to see in such a firm.

Perspective Making and Perspective Taking in Communities of Knowing

Scholars have vacillated for centuries between two opposing assessments of the role of poetics in social life. A long tradition of thinking about language and society argues that verbal art provides a central dynamic force in shaping linguistic structure and linguistic study. This position emerges clearly in the writings of Vico, Herder, and von Humboldt; attention from Sapir, the Russian "Formalists," and members of the Prague School to the role of poetics contributed to the development of performance studies and ethnopoe­ tics in the last two decades. Nonetheless, poetics has often been marginalized by anthropologists and linguists who believe that aesthetic uses of language are merely parasitic upon such "core" areas of linguistics as phonology, syntax, and semantics, or upon such anthropological fields as economy and social organization. The balance between these two views shifted in favor of poetics in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a new emphasis on performance directed attention away from study of the formal patterning and symbolic content of texts to the emergence of verbal art in the social interaction between performers and

Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life

Translator's Preface \ Introduction \ Foreword \ Part I: The Question of Truth as it Emerges in the Experience of Art \ 1. Transcending the Aesthetic Dimension \ 2. The Ontology of the Work of Art and its Hermeneutic Significance \ Part II: The Extension of the Question of Truth to Understanding in the Human Sciences \ 3. Historical Preparation \ 4. Elements of a Theory of Hermeneutic Experience \ Part III: The Ontological Shift of Hermeneutics Guided by Language \ 5. Language and Hermeneutics \ Appendices and Supplements \ Afterword \ Subject Index \ Author Index.

Truth and Method

"Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich. [...]" Already I am caught. How is it possible to refuse the illusion that Emma Woodhouse was a woman whom I can discuss with as much unself-consciousness as the woman next door? At the very moment I refer to her (her: third person, feminine), I have already tacitly removed her from the novel, credited her with an independent life, and assumed a mimetic theory of character.*

Joel Weinsheimer

Papers

Truth and Method

Theory of character: emma