Seeking Middle-Range Theories in Information Systems Research

The information systems (IS) research community continues to raise questions about the characteristics and role of theory in IS. Some suggest the preeminence and misplaced emphasis on theory distorts and limits IS research, while others suggest the manner in which theory is borrowed and adapted impedes creative and innovative theorizing. This essay describes an established mode of theorizing that produces middle-range theories, abstract enough to allow for generalizations and useful conclusions, but close enough to observed data to be empirically validated. Theorizing in this manner holds the potential to produce novel and exciting theories, far removed from the formulaic, endless rearrangement of variables that are typically derived from grand theories. After elaborating on the differences between grand theories and middle-range theories, this essay suggests several guidelines on how to build middle-range theories

Novel Idea Generation, Collaborative Filtering, and Group Innovation Processes

Organizations that innovate encounter challenges due to the complexity and ambiguity of generating and making sense of novel ideas. Exacerbated in group settings, we describe these challenges and propose potential solutions. Specifically, we design group processes to support novel idea generation and selection, including use of a novel-information discovery (NID) tool to support creativity and brainstorming, as well as group support system and collaborative-filtering tools to support evaluation and decision making. Results indicate that the NID tool increases efficiency and effectiveness in creative tasks and that the collaborative-filtering tool can support the decision-making process by focusing the group’s attention on ideas that might otherwise be neglected. Combining these two novel tools with group processes provides valuable contributions to both research and practice

Disrupting boundaries : rethinking organisation and embodiment

This thesis attempts to disrupt the boundaries of how we think about organisation and embodiment. From an investigation into five organisational regimes of Western public health, it argues that the body is a problem for organisation. The body does not come ready organised, but is a nonorganisational, messy and carnal matter of flesh and blood, pains and pleasures, habits and desires. Although modem discourses and institutions seek to organise how we live with our bodies in everyday life, they never do so fully and completely. Bodies are powerful, creative and unpredictable and disrupt the boundaries of organisation. Asking how organisation theory deals with the problem of the body, the thesis seeks to take the discipline further by developing an approach to how it should deal with the body, and by identifying what implications this might have for our thinking about organisation. Utilising the conceptualist philosophy of Canguilhem, Foucault and Deleuze, this is done by analysing the concept of "organisation" and the concept of the "body" across organisation theory and related fields. Five ways of dealing with the body are identified: (i) not dealing with it at all, which is mostly the case with mainstream research on formal organisations and more radical research on organisational processes; (ii) reducing the body to an organismic metaphor, which is what much classical and some contemporary mainstream research does; (iii) studying how embodiment enables the successful management of formal organisations; (iv) studying how bodies are organised within and without formal organisations; and (v) studying nonorganisational embodiment, i.e. how bodies disrupt and exist independently of organisation. Whereas the third and fourth themes have been investigated in some organisation theory, little attempt has been made to think about nonorganisational embodiment. Using material in Deleuze, Foucault, feminism and current organisation theory, this thesis appreciates the ways in which bodies disrupt the boundaries of organisation and the ways in which bodies live under the conditions imposed by these boundaries. From this perspective, organisation is less powerful, less stable and more fragile than we often think, and bodies are more powerful, more dynamic and more creative. This conceptualist interest in organisation, nonorganisation and the body gives rise to a theory and philosophy of organisation that might provide the underpinnings of a radical approach to everyday problems of organisation and embodiment, such as aesthetic labour and impression management; virtual organisations; culture, subcultures and resistance at work and in public space; health and safety; and gender, race and sexuality

The political event : impossibilities of repositioning organisation theory

In this thesis I outline a political problem of positioning organisation theory. I maintain that there are projects of positioning, depositioning and repositioning, which articulate organisation in different political ways. To dialectically critique the politics of these projects I discuss the way philosophers of destruction, deconstruction and impossibility conceptualise the political event. I argue that these speculative philosophies share a political belief in the need to question and show the limits of the ways social reality is positioned in the realms of modernity, capitalism and `Empire', and explore possibilities of how the world might look different. I maintain that the politics of the positioning project is to turn organisation into the hegemony of management, which I show by engaging with the particular discourse of knowledge management. The politics of the depositioning project is to resist the hegemony of management in multiple ways; I discuss particularly how organisation theorists emphasise the precariousness, plurality and locality of processes of organising. Although the political resistances by the depositioning project are of great importance, I argue that there is a tendency to not link their politics to questions of hegemony, which I show to have certain depoliticising effects. In response to these failures, the politics of the repositioning project aims to repoliticise organisation theory by speculating about a new hegemony of social organisation. My engagement with the so-called 'anticapitalist movement' and questions of its organisation and politics shows, however, that such an attempt of repositioning is itself an impossible or undecidable event. Nevertheless, I argue that it is precisely this political event of impossibility that calls for a speculative decision to be made; a decision, however, which will always fail to fully represent social organisation

The political event : impossibilities of repositioning organisation theory

In this thesis I outline a political problem of positioning organisation theory. I maintain that there are projects of positioning, depositioning and repositioning, which articulate organisation in different political ways. To dialectically critique the politics of these projects I discuss the way philosophers of destruction, deconstruction and impossibility conceptualise the political event. I argue that these speculative philosophies share a political belief in the need to question and show the limits of the ways social reality is positioned in the realms of modernity, capitalism and `Empire', and explore possibilities of how the world might look different. I maintain that the politics of the positioning project is to turn organisation into the hegemony of management, which I show by engaging with the particular discourse of knowledge management. The politics of the depositioning project is to resist the hegemony of management in multiple ways; I discuss particularly how organisation theorists emphasise the precariousness, plurality and locality of processes of organising. Although the political resistances by the depositioning project are of great importance, I argue that there is a tendency to not link their politics to questions of hegemony, which I show to have certain depoliticising effects. In response to these failures, the politics of the repositioning project aims to repoliticise organisation theory by speculating about a new hegemony of social organisation. My engagement with the so-called 'anticapitalist movement' and questions of its organisation and politics shows, however, that such an attempt of repositioning is itself an impossible or undecidable event. Nevertheless, I argue that it is precisely this political event of impossibility that calls for a speculative decision to be made; a decision, however, which will always fail to fully represent social organisation.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Organising Equal Freedom:From antagonism to agonism

This thesis is a theoretical and empirical study of prefigurative, pluralist, radically horizontal intra and inter personal processes of subjectification. The research context is Greek radical worker co-operatives abiding to pluralist radically horizontal organizing practices and prefigurative politics (autonomous, and social and solidarity economy). My methodological, conceptual, and empirical contributions aimed to align and support this context’s situated process for radically horizontal organizing, that is ‘co-formation toward synthesis’ (Gr. "syndiamorfosi pros synthesi”) assembly organizing, and address a key situated challenge, that of informal hierarchies. Through an intersubjective interpretative phenomenological lens, I employed a Militant Research -situated, co-produced, movement-led- methodological framework. This framework also entailed developing this thesis through practices of pluralist radical horizontality. Within academic discussions on selfhood, equality, freedom, and prefiguration, I developed the sensitising concepts of agonistic self-creation for intra personal processes, and agonistic empathy for inter personal processes of pluralist radical horizontality. To support these intra and inter personal processes further, I followed a fictocritical approach to empirical data. This approach allowed me to blend fact, fiction, theory, critique, and literary methods in single narratives. I developed four such narratives. Finally, I proposed seven lenses for observing movements in intra and inter personal processes, and Heraclitus’ agonistic metaphor of the farmers’ drink kykeon for visualizing these movements

Sharing Witness Along the Way: Engaging the Lived Theology of an Urban Congregation in Evangelical, Public, and Missional Strands

This ethnographic phenomenology explores the lived theology of an urban congregation as it engages with civil society. Drawing methodological considerations from Jen-Luc Marion, Paul Ricoeur, and James Clifford, the research journey attends theologically to the sociality embodied both within the congregation and with its neighborhood for the sake of participating with this congregation in bringing to discourse its lived evangelical, public, and missional theological strands. Drawing upon Charles Taylor\u27s use of moral frameworks in relationship to narratives, practices, and goods, the evangelical strand explores intimacy as a strongly valued good. Theologically, such a good makes possible James McClendon\u27s vision of a community of watch-care that bodies-forth a politics of forgiveness rooted in the Gospel. The evangelical narrative names intimate, authentic, and face-to-face relationships as participating in the Gospel of reconciled relationships. But such a narrative also excludes, for it understands Christian identity in relationship to firm boundaries. The public strand narrates the congregation\u27s perduring presence in and with the public life at its margins. Drawing upon McClendon and Miroslav Volf, the researcher shows how the congregation innovates with the theme of embodied witness to demonstrate generative reciprocality in the congregation\u27s public life. Its public life at the margins both bears witness-to and bears witness-with its neighbors in the generation of a common life Innovating with David Tracy\u27s \u27mutually critical correlation,\u27 the congregation\u27s embodied witness is a \u27mutually critical participation\u27 in and with public life. But such reciprocal witnessing is experienced by the congregation as a loss of its evangelical-intimacy narratives and thus its public life is often considered non-theologically. The missional strand disclosed to the congregation both this lack of theological attention and an emergent metaphor of \u27sowing\u27 by which the congregation articulated its trust in God\u27s faithfulness in its present liminality created by the public strand. As such, the missional strand demonstrates the possibility of genuine theological innovation on the part of the congregation to recognizing the gift of the \u27other\u27 and stranger in its midst, the gift of a public life on the way to God\u27s future in Christ