Some reflections on doing literature review in the context of action research Petter Øgland 19 th PhD Days Workshop, Oslo, September 2, 2010

Presentation plan Short background to my PhD research design and the problems I want to address through an action research approach How I have been working with theory and related research in doing and writing my PhD research My experiences and recommendations for beginning PhD students – Five challenges

Designing information systems as religious war (Hanseth, 2001) TQM practitioner

Challenge #1: Choosing the main theoretical perspective Do we want to make conversations with scholars sitting on the fence? Or, do we want to make conversations with scholars in the trench? Different conversations imply different literature reviews

Challenge #2: Identifying the relevant scholarly debates Good guys = practitioners trying to design information systems (QMS in my case) Bad guys = human and non-human actors (actants) working against the success of the practitioners Donald Schön (1983; 1987)

Trying to understand the game in order to improve play 1.Our move (IS action research team) 2. Their move… 3. Why did they do that? What are these people thinking? What do we know about similar cases? What is their strategy? What will be their next move? 4.How can we improve our strategy? Literature review

Challenge #3: Literature review for understanding the game What does it mean to understand? –The role of scientific models in scientific research (Suppes, 1957; van Frassen, 1980; Giere, 1987) –Design Science (Simon, 1996; Järvinen, 2007) How does the literature review section relate to other chapters of the thesis/paper? –V-model (Novak & Gowan, 1984) –Look for “error signals” when comparing literature review with case study (Box, 1977)

Challenge #4: Literature review for developing strategy “I wish sociologists would think more like computer scientists” (Kristen Nygaard, 1999) Bootstrap Algorithm (Hanseth & Aanestad, 2001; Hanseth, 2006; Hanseth & Lyytinen, 2010; Skorve & Aanestad, 2010) –Complex adaptive systems –Evolutionary game theory –Genetic algorithms

Challenge #5: Avoid attacking straw men Difficult to identify the real scholarly debates, because there are so many fake debates Can critical theory based on hermeneutics go beyond indoctrination? You either agree or you don’t understand. In order to have real debates (“bourgeois public sphere”) I believe we have to ground the social science in falsifiable theory (cf. Gintis, 2009).

Summary Challenge #1: Action research or detached research Challenge #2: Finding the right scholarly debate Challenge #3: Descriptive research: Building the model Challenge #4: Prescriptive research: Identifying strategy Challenge #5: Real knowledge comes from real science