Going Back to Basics: A Call for Interpretive Research to Interpret Meaning

What the paper says

We examine the methodological problem in which information systems (IS) research that describes itself as interpretive does not interpret meaning – in particular, the subjective meanings with which people come to understand not only the technologies they are using and managing, but also the overall lifeworld in which they live and work – with the result that meaning-related phenomena go undetected, uninvestigated, and therefore untheorized. We provide a review of how IS scholars originally emphasized meaning when interpretive research was first introduced to the IS discipline and we provide some motivating ideas pertaining to meaning that come from the phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and the phenomenology of Alfred Schutz. We cite Orlikowski (1993) as an exemplar with which to illustrate the difference that the interpretation of meaning makes to theory, as well as to point out the problem that would result if meaning were not interpreted or even acknowledged. We then examine how a study published by Califf et al. (2020) in MIS Quarterly can be considered to neglect meaning and we give additional examples of published articles that describe themselves as interpretive but are not transparent in reporting the details of any interpretation of meaning. We offer paths to correcting the methodological problem by returning to, and restoring the importance of, the basics of meaning.