Is Action Research and Its Criteria

There is little agreement on which criteria should be used in the design and evaluation of IS action research. Much action research is not at all explicit about the applied criteria. This chapter seeks to remedy this by eliciting from twenty odd years of action research six criteria. The epistemology of action research has traces back to pragmatism and with this as background the six criteria are presented and illustrated through a piece of recent action research. The contributions of the chapter are the six criteria, how to model these in their context of research activities and research contributions, and how to understand these criteria in a pragmatist view.

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