Internet review

Citation

Crowston, K. (2001), "Internet review", Information Technology & People, Vol. 14 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/itp.2001.16114aag.001

Internet review

Action research sites

This issue of Information Technology & People is a special issue on action research, a topic that was briefly covered in a previous Internet column(Vol. 13 No. 4, 1999) (available on line at http://crowston.syr.edu/itp/). Many of the sources discussed then are still relevant, and some will be mentioned again here.

The majority of resources on the Web fall into two categories: hotlists and articles. In the first category are pages of pointers to other articles, organizational home pages, etc., often with a particular topic focus. These include:

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  The previously discussed qualitative research methods section of the qualitative research information systems page ( http://www.auckland.ac.nz/msis/isworld/index.html), edited by Michael Myers.

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  A nicely introduced and annotated list of action research resources from Massey University's Natural Resource Management Programme ( http://nrm.massey.ac.nz/changelinks/ar.html).

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  "WEB links to participatory action research sites" from the Goshen College Department of Sociology, Social Work and Anthropology (http://www.goshen.edu/soan/soan96p.htm);

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  A short list of sites from emTech ( http://www.emtech.net/actionresearch.htm); and

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  "Corollary links: action research" from the University of Colorado at Denver, School of Education (UCD SE) ( http://carbon.cudenver.edu/~mryder/reflect/act_res.html).

In the second category, several authors provide copies of working papers or published articles. For example, Nereu Kock of Temple University has put up four papers on action research in information systems (Kock et al., 1996; Kock, McQueen and Scott, 1997; Kock, 1997; Kock, 2000), as well as a description of and discussion for a panel at the 1999 International Conference on Information Systems ( http://ww2.cis.temple.edu/kock/ICIS99/ISARpanel/Panelists/Default.htm). The panel was entitled "IS action research: can we serve two masters?" and included Ned Kock, David Avison, Richard Baskerville, Michael Myers, and Trevor Wood-Harper. Marjatta Palmu describes the use of action research in Finland, surveying works published in Finnish (Palmu, 1998). Estay-Niculcar and Pastor-Collado (2000) provide a working paper analyzing the philosophical assumptions of information systems action research. In this category, you should also consider several works mentioned in the previous column:

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  "Approaching an action research thesis: an overview" (http://www.scu.edu.au/schools/sawd/arr/phd.html).

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  Bob Dick's page, "You want to do an action research thesis? How to conduct and report action research (including a beginners guide to the literature (http://www.mcb.co.uk/imc/coursewa/doctoral/bobda.htm).

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  Rory O'Brien's "An overview of the methodological approach of action research" (http://www.web.net/~robrien/papers/arfinal.html).

Finally, to read more, UCD SE provides a list of online articles (http://www.cudenver.edu/~mryder/itc/act_res.html), as does the Action Research Electronic Reader (http://www.cchs.usyd.edu.au/arow/reader/index.htm).

Kevin Crowston

Further reading

Estay-Niculcar, C. and Pastor-Collado, J. (2000), Investigación Cualitativa en Sistemas de Informacion: Investigacion-Accion como paradigma (Research Report LSI-00-53-R). Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informatics. Available at http://www.lsi.upc.es/dept/techreps/ps/R00-53.ps.gz

Kock, N.F., Jnr, Baker, M., McQueen, R.J. and Rouse, A. (1996), "Negotiation in information systems action research" in Salis, P. (Ed.), Proceedings of the 1st Information Systems Conference of New Zealand, pp. 164-73, Los Alamitos, CA: IEEE Computer Society Press. Available at: http://www.cis.temple.edu/~kock/public/iscnz96/actn4_w6.htm

Kock, N.F., Jnr, McQueen, R.J. and Scott, J.L. (1997), "Can action research be made more rigorous in a positivist sense? The contribution of an iterative approach", Journal of Systems and Information Technology, Vol. 1 No. 1, pp. 1-24. Available at: http://www.cchs.usyd.edu.au/arow/reader/kms.htm

Kock, N.F., Jnr (1997), "Myths in organisational action research: reflections on a study of computer-supported process redesign groups", Organizations & Society, Vol. 4 No. 9, pp. 65-91. Available at: http://www.cis.temple.edu/~kock/public/ro&s/ro&s1.html

Kock, N. (2000), "Sharing interdepartmental knowledge using collaboration technologies: action research study", Journal of Information Technology Impact, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 5-10. Available at: http://www.jiti.com/v2n1/kock.html

Palmu, M. (1998), "Action research in Finland", in Hughes, I. (Ed.), Action Research Electronic Reader [online], the University of Sydney. Available at: http://www.behs.cchs.usyd.edu.au/arow/reader/palmu.htm