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The authors maintain that there is a weakness in many of the methods employed in information systems development and particularly in the requirements determination phase since this is the most organizationally dependent (Flynn, 1992). The weakness is that although the methods may have an underpinning philosophical basis, they are not explicitly embedded within any social scientific perspective. Such a perspective would enable methods or methodologies to address the organizational contexts in which their use may be envisaged (Hughes, 1998a). This would require systems developers to engage with social actors in order to find out about their social situations. This engagement may be considered to be as much interpretive research as it is practical systems development. Indeed it may be possible to extend the spectrum proposed by Nandhakumar and Jones (1997) in Figure 18.1 to include practical systems development within "Consultancy". In the figure they propose that it may be possible to consider the main methods of interpretive research as existing on a spectrum which spans from those which have most distance between researcher and subject to those in which the researcher is most engaged with the subject.

DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-29269-4_9

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