After theme 3

This week I unfortunately missed the first seminar, but I went to the second one and found it really helpful in many ways. What I didn’t really grasp going into the seminar was what the different types of theory from The nature of theory in information systems actually meant, but talking about it in our group and with Stefan Hrastinski made it much more comprehensible. In particular I came to understand the difference between explaining and predicting, which meant pretty much the opposite of what I first had thought.

When I think of predicting I immediately imagines a theory predicting the future, or future events, but this is actually quite uncommon in science in general. A theory for predicting is more about showing a connection, but not actually diving in to explain why this happens. A theory for explaining on the other hand is concerned with why and how something is happening, but not how that can affect other events.

Also, as I completely missed describing my chosen articles using the concepts described in Nature of theory in information systems and What theory is not in my last blog post, I figured I should probably write something about that here. A recap: the article I chose was called Technical code and the social construction of the internet by Flanagin A. J., Flanagin C. & Flanagin J. (2009). The aim of the article was using the concept of technical code to examine the internet’s “evolution, current form and future potential”. For a long time I was lured by the fact that the authors are making some vague predictions in the concluding part. I figured predictions -> theory of prediction, but as I’ve learnt now that is not how it works. The core of the article is using this theory, technical code, to describe and analyse the history and current state of the internet. This places the theory mainly under theory of analyzing.

The conclusion of the article begins with this quote: “The technical code perspective provides a penetrating view of technologies by increasing awareness of the choices that form them …”. The first time I read it it went right past me, but looking at it again it struck me just how the choice of theory shapes an article. Using technical code helped the authors focus on important choices made during the development of the internet. Had the authors based the article on, for example, theories based in technological determinism they could probably have done roughly the same study, looking at the same aspects but coming to a very different conclusion.

So, what did I learn this week? I learnt there are different types of theory. I (think) I learnt what the concept of theory actually means in a scientific context. I learnt that the choice of theory is important, and that the choice is not necessarily between right and wrong but rather about what you want to communicate with your research.