Information Technology & People 

About: Information Technology & People is an academic journal published by Emerald Publishing Limited. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Computer science & Originality. It has an ISSN identifier of 0959-3845. Over the lifetime, 1149 publications have been published receiving 45443 citations. The journal is also known as: Information technology and people.

The Dual Imperatives of Action Research

Abstract: Action research (AR) is not without its critics, and those who reject some of the paradigmatic assumptions embodied in AR maintain that AR is little more than consultancy, that it is impossible to establish causal relationships, that it is difficult to generalize from AR studies, that there is a risk of researcher bias, and that generally speaking, it lacks some of the key qualities that are normally associated with rigorous research. The authors are sensitive to such criticisms, for although they are committed action researchers, they have elsewhere voiced their concerns about the quality of AR practice in the field of information systems. The authors argue that part of the issue concerns the way in which we currently conceptualize AR. In this article, the argument for a deeper and more reflective analysis of the meaning and full implications of AR is developed, culminating in a model of AR being developed that explicitly includes both a problem solving interest cycle and a research interest cycle. Important implications of this new model are articulated, with examples to illustrate these points being drawn from a real‐life AR study.

Weblogs as a bridging genre

Abstract: Purpose – Aims to describe systematically the characteristics of weblogs (blogs) – frequently modified web pages in which dated entries are listed in reverse chronological sequence and which are the latest genre of internet communication to attain widespread popularity.Design/methodology/approach – This paper presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of 203 randomly selected blogs, comparing the empirically observable features of the corpus with popular claims about the nature of blogs, and finding them to differ in a number of respects.Findings – Notably, blog authors, journalists and scholars alike exaggerate the extent to which blogs are interlinked, interactive, and oriented towards external events, and underestimate the importance of blogs as individualistic, intimate forms of self‐expression.Originality/value – Based on the profile generated by the empirical analysis, considers the likely antecedents of the blog genre, situates it with respect to the dominant forms of digital communica...