Effectuation and its implications for socio-technical design science research in information systems

We study the implications of the effectuation concept for socio-technical artifact design as part of the design science research (DSR) process in information systems (IS). Effectuation logic is the opposite of causal logic. Ef-fectuation does not focus on causes to achieve a particular effect, but on the possibilities that can be achieved with extant means and resources. Viewing so-cio-technical IS DSR through an effectuation lens highlights the possibility to design the future even without set goals. We suggest that effectuation may be a useful perspective for design in dynamic social contexts leading to a more dif-ferentiated view on the instantiation of mid-range artifacts for specific local ap-plication contexts. Design science researchers can draw on this paper’s conclu-sions to view their DSR projects through a fresh lens and to reexamine their re-search design and execution. The paper also offers avenues for future research to develop more concrete application possibilities of effectuation in socio-technical IS DSR and, thus, enrich the discourse.

Dealing with emergent design science research projects in IS

Multiple models, methods and frameworks have been proposed to guide Design Science Research (DSR) application to address relevant classes of problems in Information Systems (IS) discipline. While much of the ambiguity around the research paradigm has been removed, only the surface has been scratched on DSR efforts where researcher takes an active role in organizational and industrial engagement to solve a specific problem and generalize the solution to a class of problems. Such DSR projects can have a significant impact on practice, link theories to real contexts and extend the scope of DSR. Considering these multiform settings, the implications to theorizing nor the crucial role of researcher in the interplay of DSR and IS projects have not been properly addressed. The emergent nature of such projects needs to be further investigated to reach such contributions for both theory and practice. This paper raises multiple theoretical, organizational and managerial considerations for a meta-level monitoring model for emergent DSR projects.

Ontological representation of design science research publications

A search result provided by existing digital library and web search systems typically comprises only a prioritised list of possible publications or web pages that meet the search criteria, possibly with excerpts and possibly with search terms highlighted. The research in progress reported in this poster contributes to a larger research effort to provide a readable summary of search results that synthesise relevant publications or web pages to provide results that meet four C’s: comprehensive, concise, coherent, and correct, as a more useful alternative to un-synthesised result lists. The scope of this research is limited to searching for and synthesising Design Science Research (DSR) publications that present the results of DSR, as an example problem domain.

Action design research: a comparison with canonical action research and design science

This research in progress paper addresses the IS issue in relation to conducting relevant research while keeping academic rigor. In particular, it contributes to the ongoing academic conversation around the investigation on how to incor-porate action in design science research. In this document the philosophical underpinnings of the recently proposed methodology called Action Design Re-search [1] are derived, outlined and integrated into Burrel and Morgan’s Par-adigmatic Framework (1979)[6]. The results so far show how Action Design Research can be considered as a particular case of Design Science Research (rather than a methodology closely related to Action Research) although they can assume two different epistemological positions. From these philosophical perspectives, future works will involve the inclusion of actual research projects using the three different methodologies. The final goal is to outline and structure the divergences and similarities of Action Design Research with Design Science Research and Canonical Action Research.

At the Vanguard of Design Science: First Impressions and Early Findings from Ongoing Research

Published Version

Living long-term with acquired brain injury in Ireland: towards a counter discourse

Irish literature on Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) is very scant and is mainly deficits and/or needs based. The focus is generally on how to manage the short term needs of the younger population with ABI. The starting position of my thesis is that people living long-term with ABI are important participants in developing knowledge about this social phenomenon, living with ABI while accepting that their brain injury does not determine them. Six mature adults with ABI and their six significant others participated in this longitudinal study. Using a narrative approach in interviews, over twenty months, five repeat individual interviews with each of the twelve participants was held. From this I gained an understanding of their lived experiences, their life-world and their experiences of our local public ABI/disability services, systems and discourse. Along with this new empirical data, theoretical developments from occupational therapy, occupational science, sociology, and disability studies were also used within a meta-narrative informed by critical theory and critical realism to develop a synthesis of this study. Social analysis of their narratives co-constructed with me, allowed me generate nuanced insights into tendencies and social processes that impacted and continues to impact on their everyday-everynight living. I discuss in some depth here, the relational attitudinal, structural, occupational and environmental supports, barriers or discrimination that they face(d) in their search for social participation and community inclusion. Personal recognition of the disabled participants by their family, friends and/or local community, was generally enhanced after much suffering, social supports, slow recovery, and with some form of meaningful occupational engagement. This engagement was generally linked with pre-injury interests or habits, while Time itself became both a major aid and a need. The present local ABI discourse seldom includes advocacy and inclusion in everyday/every night local events, yet most participants sought both peer-support or collective recognition, and social/community inclusion to help develop their own counter-discourse to the dominant ABI discourse. This thesis aims to give a broad social explanation on aspects of their social becoming, 'self-sameness' and social participation, and the status of the disabled participants wanting to live 'the slow life'. Tensions and dialectical issues involved in moving from the category of a person in coma, to person with a disability, to being a citizen should not demote the need for special services. While individualized short-term neuro-rehabilitation is necessary, it is not sufficient. Along with the participants, this researcher asks that community health and/or social care planners and service-providers rethink how ABI is understood and represented, and how people with ABI are included in their local communities

Issues in the prescribing of psychotropic and psychoactive medication for persons with learning disability: quantitative and qualitative perspectives

The administration of psychotropic and psychoactive medication for persons with learning disability and accompanying mental illness and/or challenging behaviour has undergone much critical review over the past two decades. Assessment and diagnosis of mental illness in this population continues to be psychopharmacological treatment include polypharmacy, irrational prescription procedures and frequent over-prescription. It is clear that all forms of treatment including non-pharmacological interventions need to be driven by accurate and appropriate diagnoses. Where a psychiatric diagnosis has been identified, it greatly aides the selection of appropriate medication, although a specific medication for each diagnosis, as was once hoped, is simply no longer a reality in practice. Part one of the present thesis seeks to address many of the current issues in mental health problems and pharmacological treatment to date. The author undertook a drug prevalence study within both residential and community facilities for persons with learning disability within the Mid-West region of Ireland in order to ascertain the current level of prescribing of psychotropic and psychoactive medications for this population. While many attempts have been made to account for the variation in prescribing, little systematic and empirical research has been undertaken to investigate the factors thought to influence such prescribing. While studies investigating the prescribing behaviours of General Practitioners (GP's) have illustrated the complex nature of the decision making process in the context of general practice, no similar efforts have yet been directed at examining the prescribing behaviours of Consultant Psychiatrists. Using The Critical Incident Technique, the author interviewed Consultant Psychiatrists in the Republic of Ireland to gather information relating not only to their patterns of prescribing for learning disabled populations, but also to examine reasons influencing their prescribing in addition to several related factors. Part two of this thesis presents the findings from this study and a number of issues are raised, not only in relation to attempting to account for the findings from part one of the thesis, but also with respect to implications for improved management and clinical practice.

Understanding student stress: a qualitative study of the stress experienced by third level students

Stress can be understood in terms of the meaning of stressful experiences for individuals. The meaning of stressful experiences involves threats to self-adequacy, where self-adequacy is considered a basic human need. Appropriate research methods are required to explore this aspect of stress. The present study is a qualitative exploration of the stress experienced by a group of 27 students at the National Institute of Higher Education, Limerick (since renamed the University of Limerick). The study was carried out by the resident student counsellor at the college. A model of student stress was explored, based on student developmental needs. The data consist of a series of interviews recorded with each of the 27 students over a 3 month period. These interviews were transcribed and the resulting transcripts are the subject of detailed analysis. The analysis of the data is an account of the sense-making process by the student counsellor of the students' reported experiences. The aim of the analysis was to reduce the large amounts of data to their most salient aspects in an ordered fashion, so as to examine the application of a developmental model of stress with this group of students. There were two key elements to the analysis. First, the raw data were edited to identify the key statements contained in the interviews. Second, the statements were categorised, as a means of summarising the data. The results of the qualitative dataanalysis were then applied to the developmental model. The analysis of data revealed a number of patterns of stress amongst the sample of students. Patterns of academic over-identification, parental conflict and social inadequacy were particularly noteworthy. These patterns consisted of an integration of academic, family and social stresses within a developmental framework. Gender differences with regard to the need for separateness and belonging are highlighted. Appropriate student stress intervention strategies are discussed. Based on the present results, the relationship between stress and development has been highlighted and is recommended as a firm basis for future studies of stress in general and student stress in particular.

The lived experience of Irish diocesan priests. A qualitative study of clerical identity, obedience and celibacy.

The main aim of this thesis is to document and explore the lived experience of Irish diocesan priests and former priests, in order to explore the reality of diocesan priesthood in contemporary Ireland, and to investigate how, if at all, diocesan priesthood has changed in Ireland during the past fifty years. It sought to do this by interrogating the stories of thirty-three diocesan priests and former priests, and by placing their individual stories within the broader context of Irish society and the Catholic Church, during the fifty-year period, 1962–2012. The research focused on three core areas of priesthood – identity, obedience, and celibacy – and it addressed the following questions. First, how do Irish diocesan priests understand their priesthood and how has this understanding changed over time, if at all? I will argue that three paradigms of priesthood co-exist in the contemporary Irish Church, and that each of these models corresponds with a distinct period in contemporary Irish Church history. I will also demonstrate the existence of underlying similarities in the cultural practice of priesthood that transcend the different generations of priests. Second, how do Irish diocesan priests negotiate their priesthood within a large and complex institution? My study suggests that Irish diocesan priests are typically loyal and obedient. However, they are not necessarily subservient. Third, how do Irish diocesan priests understand and experience celibacy in their day-to-day lives? My study demonstrates that celibacy is typically understood and experienced along a continuum, ranging from total acceptance to total rejection, with most priests somewhere in between. Fourth, I will argue that while priests are experiencing many difficulties in their lives, there is insufficient evidence from the present study to indicate they are experiencing a crisis.

A post-structuralist analysis of Irish youth crime prevention policy with specific emphasis on the Garda youth diversion projects

Garda Youth Diversion Projects (GYDPs) have since their beginnings in the early 1990s gained an increasingly important role and now constitute a central feature of Irish youth justice provision. Managed by the Irish Youth Justice Service and implemented by the Gardai and a variety of youth work organisations as well as independent community organisations, GYDPs are located at the crossroads of welfarist and corporatist approaches to youth justice, combining diversionary and preventative aspects in their work. To date, these projects have been subjected to very little systematic analysis and they have thus largely escaped critical scrutiny. To address this gap, this thesis locates the analysis of GYDP policy and practice within a post-structuralist theoretical framework and deploys discourse analysis primarily based on the work of Michel Foucault. It makes visible the official youth crime prevention and GYDP policy discourses and identifies how official discourses relating to youth crime prevention, young people and their offending behaviour, are drawn upon, negotiated, rejected or re-contextualised by project workers and JLOs. It also lays bare how project workers and JLOs draw upon a variety of other discourses, resulting in multi-layered, complex and sometimes contradictory constructions of young people, their offending behaviour and corresponding interventions. At a time when the projects are undergoing significant changes in terms of their repositioning to operate as the support infrastructure underpinning the statutory Garda Youth Diversion Programme, the thesis traces the discursive shifts and the implications for practice that are occurring as the projects move away from a youth work orientation towards a youth justice orientation. A key contribution of this thesis is the insight it provides into how young people and their families are being constituted in individualising and sometimes pathologising ways in GYDP discourses and practices. It reveals the part played by the GYDP intervention in favouring individual and narrow familial causes of offending behaviour while broader societal contexts are sidelined. By explicating the very assumptions upon which contemporary youth crime prevention policy, as well as GYDP policy and practice are based, this thesis offers a counterpoint to the prevailing evidence-based agenda of much research in the field of Irish youth justice theory and youth studies more generally. Rather, it encourages the reader to take a step back and examine some of the most fundamental and unquestioned assumptions about the construction of young people, their offending behaviour and ways of addressing this, in contemporary Irish youth crime prevention policy and practice.

A study of the Zhiqing identity

More than seventeen million Chinese urban youth (Zhiqing in Chinese) went to the countryside, lived and engaged in agricultural work there during the Up to the Mountains and Down to the Countryside (UMDC) Movement (1967-1981). Although this movement was officially terminated in 1981, it has left an imprint on these people – the Zhiqing identity by which they are still characterized as a unique group in Chinese society and a special generation in Chinese history. Historical and sociological perspectives are combined in this study. By applying Glen H. Elder’s life course approach, the study reveals how Zhiqing’s life trajectories are embedded in the social history and identifies a series of interrelated factors that made Zhiqing into a unique generation. With the guidance of Henri Tajfel’s social identity theory, the study uncovers the emergence of the Zhiqing group and the Zhiqing identity, explains individuals’ acquisitions of the Zhiqing identity and analyzes how it has kept influencing individuals’ lives during and after the UMDC Movement. Using Zhiqing’s life stories allowed the researcher to combine the historical and sociological aspects in her examination of Zhiqing’s identity issues. In each life story, the narrator reviewed his/her life experience, reflected on socio-historical changes and expressed his/her emotions and ideas about identity issues. Utilizing methods of in-depth interview and thematic analysis, the researcher completed the study and presents this thesis as one interpretation on the Zhiqing identity, which, as according the researcher’s hermeneutic stance, is open to further discussion and future research.

Place, teenagers and urban identities: Growing up in the revanchist city

The recreational lives of teenagers in Ireland has been the subject of much debate in recent years. The subject has received much attention from academics, particularly in the UK and the US. In Ireland there is a dearth of research on, and a poor understanding of teenagers recreational lives. Additionally much of the research from the UK and the US to date has been focused on teenagers’ use of the street for recreation, arguing that teenagers are increasingly pushed out of public space. The research frequently emphasises teenagers’ resistance against adult hegemony. This thesis explores the recreational geographies of teenagers living in two socially and economically distinct neighbourhoods in Cork. It seeks to fill in gaps in knowledge of teenagers recreational lives in Ireland and contribute to geographical wisdom on teenagers’ geographies. Using a mixed method approach and a variety of thinking tools this research shows that teenagers living in Cork are growing up in a revanchist society. The thesis demonstrates how teenagers’ recreational practices are currently being configured in Irish society, unfolding strategies of dominance and affection which construct and regulate the recreational lives of teenagers. The effects of revanchism on teenagers’ experiences of outdoor space for recreation are also pursued. Furthermore the socio-spatial contingencies of teenagers’ recreational lives and revanchism are probed throughout the thesis, but in greater depth in the final chapters. The work also addresses an under-researched aspect of young people’s recreational - relationships with pets. Lastly, the subject of teenagers’ right to urban space is critically analysed.

Health care and neoliberalism in Ireland: withholding the gift and corrupting the social contract

The health of a nation tells much about the nature of a social contract between citizen and state. The way that health care is organised, and the degree to which it is equitably accessible, constitutes a manifestation of the effects of moments and events in that country's history. Using four case studies, this thesis uses a historical genealogical approach to explain the evolution of Ireland's particular version of health care provision. The total social fact of the gift relationship, central to all human relations, will be used to form a theoretical and conceptual framework on which to build an analysis of Ireland's health and welfare conditions. Additionally, social contract theory will enable an examination of the role of solidarity in relation to social expectations around health care provision. Through the analysis of these cases, the complex matrix of the influential forces that have shaped current conditions are exposed and revealed, enabling a critical understanding of the extent of acquiescence to the inequitable system that arguably exists. The vulnerability of citizens in need of care to the external and global effects of market forces and neoliberalism, therefore, becomes central to any argument for state-provided health and welfare. The hegemony of such forces can be seen to influence the manner in which the idea of individual self-reliance, in place of collective solidarity, is conceptualised and subsequently infiltrated into a range of aspects of the social world. For example, the particular discourse of the market and of economic concerns succeeds in shaping understandings of responsibilities around central areas of health and welfare. Similarly the 'possessor principle' can be seen to be misplaced within the context of health and social care, but yet has become normalised within this discourse. Within this matrix of complex influencing factors, the welfare state struggles to impose a balance between market values and social values. Responsibilities of the state to support and compensate its citizens for the ills of the market have become devalued, as the core values of classical liberalism have become distorted beyond recognition, leaving instead bare neoliberal concerns. This thesis traces the genealogical origins of this transition within the recent history of Irish health care and thereby reveals the embedding of individualism in place of solidarity, the on going reneging of the social contract and the corruption of the gift relationship.

The legitimation of risk and democracy: A case study of Bt cotton in Andhra Pradesh, India

This thesis explores the inter-related attempts to secure the legitimation of risk and democracy with regard to Bt cotton, a genetically modified crop, in the state of Andhra Pradesh in India. The research included nine months of ethnographic fieldwork, extensive library and newspaper research, as well as university attendance in India, undertaken between June, 2010 and March, 2011. This comparative study (involving organic, NPM and Bt cotton cultivation) was conducted in three villages in Telangana, a region which was granted secession from Andhra Pradesh in July, 2013, and in Hyderabad, the state capital. Andhra Pradesh is renowned for its agrarian crisis and farmer suicides, as well as for the conflict which Bt cotton represents. This study adopts the categories of legitimation developed by Van Leeuwen (2007; 2008) in order to explore the theory of risk society (Beck, 1992; 1994; 1999; 2009), and the Habermasian (1996: 356-366) core-periphery model as means of theoretically analysing democratic legitimacy. The legitimation of risk and democracy in relation to Bt cotton refers to normative views on the way in which power should be exercised with regard to risk differentiation, construction and definition. The analysis finds that the more legitimate the exercise of power, the lower the exposure to risk as a concern for the collective. This also has consequences for the way in which resources are distributed, knowledge constructed, and democratic praxis institutionalised as a concern for social and epistemic justice. The thesis argues that the struggle to legitimate risk and democracy has implications not only for the constitution of the new state of Telangana and the region’s development, but also for the emergence of global society and the future development of humanity as a whole.

Community workers' understandings and practices of resistance

This research is focused on Community Workers located in Southern Ireland, and their understandings and practices of resistance. It is an attempt to explore the ways in which community workers’ understandings and practices of resistance are formed and, in turn, inform their sense of identity and their responses to the wider context of community development work in Ireland today. This study is specifically located but also has wider application and relevance because of the extended international reach of neo-liberal and managerial rationalities, and their implications for politics, policy and practice. The study considers resistance in a number of inter-related ways: as a collective oppositional position (with negative and positive dimensions); a personal and/or professional value (associated with the ‘expansion of contention’); a strategy for negotiating unequal power relations (in a range of levels and spaces of power); an identity (in relation to the sustaining of ‘reflexive subjectivities’); a set of practices, (which take into account the interplay between economic, political and cultural influences); and an educational process through which practitioners assess and enact personal and professional agency. Critical theorisations of community development and of the Irish state over time, trace the ways in which neo-liberalism and managerialism has inflected community development practice and the positions of community workers and communities in that process. The study draws on James C. Scott, Gramsci, Barnes and Prior, among others, which enabled the interrogation of resistance in relation to everyday practices through engaging with ‘hidden transcripts’ and spaces. The method chosen was focus group discussions with three groups of community workers located in different counties in Southern Ireland. This method facilitated a deep discourse analysis of practitioners’ encounters with resistance in the field of community work. Key findings relate to the various interpretations of the role of resistance, practices of resistance (including current restrictions), the value of resistance work and the conditions that may be conducive to practising resistance.