The interpretive perspective

After a scan of literature addressing some of the perspectives that view reality and knowledge as socially constructed I found myself confused. I could relate to each one of them but had no selection criteria to make a choice. I returned to the literature but this time I was looking on how a researcher adopts one perspective over another.

Orlikowski and Baroudi (1991) recommend that

… researchers should ensure that they adopt a perspective that is compatible with their own research interests and predispositions while remaining open to the possibility of other assumptions and interests. They should understand and acknowledge the extent to which the perspective they adopt will focus their attention on some things and not others, and bias their perception of the phenomena they study. (p. 24, italics added)

Reflecting more on my own predispositions, I understood that I was further from radical constructivism and closer to interpretivism. Radical constructivism denies that a true reality exists apart from human existence. While interpretivists view truth as relative to the eye of the beholder, the radical constructivists view viability as relative to the eye of the beholder (Marton 2011). I do believe that there is a physical world out there, however, this physical world does not “have an independent, objective and ‘true’

expression” (Kjærgaard 2004, p. 41). Rather, reality is constructed through the meaning actors assign to their experiences and observations.

Since, I already had identified my own predispositions,the above quote of Orlikowski and Baroudi (1991) directed my attention to my research interests and the phenomena under investigation and how they relate to the relativist philosophical paradigms. The next paragraphs describe how the choice of paradigm was narrowed down by thinking about, negotiating and reflecting on the nature of my research interests.

The motivation for this study stemmed from the need to organize insights into how to use BI in decision-making practices with the ultimate goal of making “better”

decisions. However, after a first look into the literature and meetings between myself and experts/researchers on decision making and information systems, it became clear that there was a need to understand how business intelligence (BI) is used in organizations and what its role is in decision making. In order to be able to say anything about making “better” decisions first I needed to gain a thorough understanding of decision practices. Further, the idea of making “better” decisions is in itself almost intractable since it is very difficult to define evaluation criteria for what constitutes better decisions. These insights were also reported and discussed with the company supervisors and it was decided that the study would have a focus on understanding practice.

Therefore, very early in the process the focus shifted to how the organization uses the output of BI in the process of making organizational decisions. Organizational decision-making is a social process and the use of the output of BI in this social process is dependent on both the time and the particular decision to be made. The nature of this research, with its pursuit of understanding the connections and interactions among the output of BI, the decision makers, and the decisions, all of which constitute different parts of a social reality, pointed to an interpretive perspective. According to Orlikowski and Baroudi (1991)

… social processes can be usefully studied with an interpretive perspective, which is explicitly designed to capture complex, dynamic, social phenomena that are both context and time dependent. (p. 18)

This study is concerned with a practical perspective on the use of the output of BI in organizational decision-making and the analysis of practices is therefore central. This focus calls for a study that is more inclined towards contextually dependent observational approaches. According to Orlikowski and Baroudi (1991), an interpretive

approach is appropriate when the researcher seeks to understand how people create meanings and take action in a particular context through an emergent process.

Therefore, I chose an interpretive approach in order to understand how decision makers create meanings and use the BI output in the Danske Bank Group through emergent decision making processes.

Further readings on the interpretive perspective made clear that this is a suitable choice since it meets my predisposition toward the world and is compatible with the nature of this research study. Below I present some of the key concepts of the interpretive perspective on how to obtain knowledge about reality.

The assumption concerning cognition within the school of interpretivism is that reality is ‘interpreted’ by the subject (Walsham 1995; Klein and Myers 1999; Weber 2004).

This means that reality is constructed by the individual’s subjective and intersubjective experiences and consciousness.

The interpretive perspective considers knowledge within a constructivist ontology and the use, design and study of information systems in organizations is thought of as a hermeneutic process of reading and interpreting this construction as text (Walsham 1993). The hermeneutic circle is a fundamental principle of the interpretive perspective. Although, hermeneutics is considered by many researchers to be a philosophical perspective itself, the hermeneutic circle is a common element in all perspectives that adopt a subjective epistemology.

Interpretive research is primarily concerned with human understanding and seeks to understand social members' descriptions of a situation through the meaning that the members assign to the situation (Klein and Myers 1999). The hermeneutic circle is a process theory of how human understanding is achieved (Gadamer 2003). It describes understanding as an emergent, circular process of interpretation and stresses the reciprocity between the whole and its parts (Gadamer 2003). As such, to understand the meaning of parts one has to understand the whole (context) and vice versa.

Interpretation moves from a vague understanding of the whole to an improved understanding of the parts and back to a better understanding of the whole (Klein and Myers 1999). For example in a conversation between two people, the ‘parts’ would be their preconceptions of the topic and the ‘whole’ would be the shared meanings that emerge from the interaction between them. Therefore, shared meanings “are a form of intersubjectivity rather than objectivity” (Walsham 1995, p. 320).

Meaning is constructed as people interact and engage with the world around them. In an interpretive study the researcher creates meaning by accessing the meanings that participants assign to the phenomenon under investigation (their practices and actions).

Thus, the researcher should employ methods that increase awareness of how the participants perceive, act and engage with the world (Walsham 1995). Further, since the participants’ knowledge and actions are constructed within the broader historical and social context in which they act, it is of paramount importance that the researcher understands this context. Notably, at this point there is another instance of the hermeneutic circle: actions and context.

The role of the researcher in interpretive studies is described as active and engaging (Walsham 1995). In his/her attempt to understand the phenomenon, the researcher brings prior knowledge and preconceptions to their interpretation, and is at the same time is impacted by the research process itself. While in other paradigms the involvement of the researcher in the research process is avoided at any costs, in an interpretive study it is rather required. It is through involvement and interactions between the researcher and the phenomenon (participants, context, field) that meaning is constructed. Walsham (2006) views this involvement more as a spectrum changing over time from the ‘neutral’ observer to the action researcher. That said, he acknowledges that there is no such thing as a truly unbiased researcher since “we are all biased by our own background, knowledge and prejudices to see things in certain ways and not others” (Walsham 2006, p. 321).

In summary, understanding and reflecting on my own ontological and epistemological predispositions, the research topic and goal, and the use of interpretivism as a philosophical perspective, I constructed my meaning of an interpretive study as an appropriate approach to investigate the phenomenon (see Figure 7 for an illustration).

Hence, I employ an interpretive study to gain an in-depth understanding of the use of the BI output in organizational decision-making. In the following section, I describe how the above constructed meaning further inspired and shaped the research design.

Figure 7: My constructed meaning of the interpretive study as the appropriate approach