Ontology: On positivism, realism, and their relevance for critical IS research

I have already touched on the debate between positivism and interpretivism in the social sciences in general and in IS in particular. This debate is central to the definition of the field of information systems and also to the standing of different positions within this field. It is crucial for the acceptance of research agendas and it determines what counts as legitimate knowledge and what does not. This importance has led to a ubiquity of related debates that have elicited negative reactions to the very question of paradigm. Ron Weber (2004, p. xi), for example, wishes to ‘assign the rhetoric of positivism versus interpretivism to the scrap heap’ because it serves no purpose and leads to schisms. There are nevertheless good reasons to return to this debate and look at it from a different angle. First, CRIS is often described as an alternative to positivism and interpretivism. For a book such as this, it is thus of central importance to understand whether this classification is tenable. I believe that this is not the case for reasons having to do with issues of ontology. Furthermore, there are increasingly calls for a combination of different approaches and paradigms whose philosophical underpinnings are rarely questioned. One can frequently hear calls for multi-paradigm or multi-method research in IS, which typically imply that the positivisminterpretivism dichotomy is being ignored and that the research should incorporate aspects from both. Again, this is important for critical research, which is part of neither positivism nor interpretivism and could thus play the role of combining them. In this chapter I will touch on these issues and argue that there are two basic ontological positions that one can follow and that these are closely linked to the research paradigms that are available. I will furthermore argue that these two ontological positions are contradictory, which will have implications for a variety of questions that influence the choice of research strategy and methodology, but also the choice of topics and possible outcomes.