This book contains the papers presented and discussed at the conference that was held in May/June 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA, and that was sponsored by Working Group 8.2 of the International Federation for Information Processing. IFIP established 8.2 as a group concerned with the interaction of information systems and the organization.
Information Systems and Qualitative Research is essential reading for professionals and students working in information systems in a business environment, such as systems analysts, developers and designers, data administrators, and senior executives in all business areas that use information technology, as well as consultants in the fields of information systems, management, and quality management.

Inhalt
1 Information Systems and Qualitative Research.- One Overviewing and Assessing Qualitative IS Research.- 2 The qualitative difference in information systems research and practice.- 3 Crisis in the case study crisis: marginal diminishing returns to scale in the quantitative-qualitative research debate.- 4 A review on the use of action research in information systems studies.- 5 Panel the impact of action research on information systems.- 6 Process models in information systems.- 7 Systems of meaning: ethnography as a methodology for the study of information technologies.- 8 Panel assessing critical social theory research in information systems.- Two Interpretation and IS Requirements Definition.- 9 Examining project history narratives: an analytic approach.- 10 Exploring analyst-client communication: using grounded theory techniques to investigate interaction in information requirements gathering.- 11 Constituting users in requirements techniques.- Three Illustrating, Experiencing, and Being Critical in Ethnography.- 12 A discourse on ethnography.- 13 Achieving the research goal with qualitative methods: lessons learned along the way.- 14 Capturing complex, distributed activities: video-based interaction analysis as a component of workplace ethnography.- 15 Critical ethnography in information systems.- Four Interviewing and the Interviewer.- 16 Exploring a chairman of the board's construction of organizational reality: the Colruyt case.- 17 Acquiring expert knowledge on IS function design.- Five The Social and Political Context of IS.- 18 Transitioning to client/server: using a temporal framework to study organizational change.- 19 Playing politics with e-mail: a longitudinal conflict-based analysis.- 20 Becoming part of the furniture: the institutionalizationof information systems.- Six Developments in Qualitative Methods.- 21 Value in triangulation: a comparison of two approaches for combining qualitative and quantitative methods.- 22 Qualitative research in information systems: time to be subjective?.- 23 Actor-network theory and IS research: current status and future prospects.- 24 Imagine: thought experiments in information systems research.- 25 Legal case analysis in IS research: failures in employing and outsourcing for IT professionals.- 26 Balancing interpretation and intervention in information systems research: the action case approach.- 27 Using case study research to build theories of IT implementation.- 28 Panel qualitative research opportunities in health care.- Index of Contributors.