Michael D. Myers: Conducting Critical Research in IS, and its relationship with IS Design Research

Critical research has emerged as a potentially important stream in information systems research, yet the nature and methods of critical research are still in need of clarification. While criteria or principles for evaluating positivist and interpretive research have been widely discussed, criteria or principles for evaluating critical social research are lacking. Therefore, the purpose of this presentation is to propose a set of principles for the conduct of critical research. A paper on this topic has just been published in MIS Quarterly and follows on from an earlier piece that suggested a set of principles for interpretive research (Klein and Myers, 1999). The co-author of this paper is Heinz Klein. In addition, the talk with present design research in information systems, as one of the main tools to address some important research problems, specially in engineering environments, and will relate this type of research with the principles of critical research previously established.

 

Michael D. Myers is Professor of Information Systems and Head of the Department of Information Systems and Operations Management at the University of Auckland Business School, Auckland, New Zealand. His research articles have been published in many journals and books. He won the Best Paper award (with Heinz Klein) for the most outstanding paper published in MIS Quarterly in 1999. This paper has been cited over 1750 times and is third most cited paper to appear in MIS Quarterly. He also won the Best Paper Award (with Lynda Harvey) for the best paper published in Information Technology & People in 1997. He currently serves as Editor of the AISWorld Section on Qualitative Research. He previously served as Senior Editor of Information Systems Research from 2008-2010, as Senior Editor of MIS Quarterly from 2001-2005, and as Associate Editor of Information Systems Journal from 1995-2000. He also served as President of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) in 2006-2007 and as Chair of the International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 8.2 from 2006-2008. Michael is a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems.