Theme 3 (Post): Research and theory

For the third theme “Research and theory” of the course we had to read excerpts of Shirley Gregor’s "The Nature of Theory in Information Systems” and Robbert I. Sutton and Barry M. Staw’s “What Theory is Not”. Furthermore we had to select and critically examine a high quality research paper in order to prepare ourselves for the lecture. Due to its diversity and quantity the preparation of the third theme took by far the longest time compared to the first and second theme. In addition to the readings I researched on the internet in order to find out more about the questions, which were asked to us. Due to the “dry nature” of theme three it was challenging to me to stay focused towards the tasks.

The lecture of Leif Dahlberg was very good structured and we have received a lot of information were presented to us via a presentation. However, it was quite difficult to me to read at the same time the slides of the presentation, listening to the teacher and taking notes and hence I sometimes lost the thread. That’s why I decided to focus on taking notes and rereading them after the lecture to get a proper understanding of the topic, which definitely was a good decision for me. However and despite the notes the difference between a hypothesis and a theory was still not totally clear to me. Besides the presentation we had a discussion in smaller groups about “What is man?” which showed me how difficult it is to identify an object with a set of propositions. The teacher explained after the discussion that this construct is a theory and shall exist in order to describe, explain and enhance understanding of the world. The discussion was very useful to get the main idea of what a theory is and how complex it is to develop one.

During the seminar we were again divided into smaller groups where we discussed our understanding of the lecture and the papers, which we had selected to read. In my case I explained why I think that the authors used the theory type "analysis" and supported my reasoning with examples out of the paper. As my group members had the same urge to discuss the difference between hypothesis and theory we spent the biggest share of our time on this topic. Once the groups were back together we discussed together with Ilias Bergström and came to the conclusion that a theory is based on facts and a hypothesis can be seen as a sort of pre-stage of a theory and an attempt to explain phenomena. Hence, a theory is the result of testing a hypothesis and creating an explanation that is assumed to be “correct”. I think it can be said that a successful hypothesis, i.e. a hypothesis which is confirmed by testing, is replaced by a theory. Furthermore, it was very interesting to hear from Ilias Bergström that the two papers which we had to read have no generally valid approach and are put in the respective context. For example Shirley Gregor’s "The Nature of Theory in Information Systems” is about theory put into the context of information systems. This helped me to understand that a field like “Research and theory” is too complex to enable universal theories, as one valid theory in one context is potentially not valid in another context and hence the view heavily dependent on one’s academic discipline.