Human in the loop

Klein and Myers’ (1999) statement that the natural science model of social science is widely accepted in information systems (IS) epitomises the ongoing debate in IS research about the research foundations and the methods that are applicable in the discipline. This is neither a new problem, nor one isolated to IS. Right from the enlightenment, the abandoning of the theological and the metaphysical led to the reliance on science as the philosophical foundation and direction for enquiry and study. This developing view of what is scientific led to the classification of sciences and an increasing dominance of reductionism as the consensus approach. Comte placed sociology as the pinnacle of science, where all science merges to act on humans. Furthermore, it was Durkheim who sought to place social science on what was perceived as the firmer foundation of natural sciences, viewing the social realm as external to us and hence best addressed by the empirical methods of natural sciences (Prowse, 2005). Human agency was eclipsed and individuals became part of a collective, a deterministic social machine. While Durkheim’s influence may have waned, the ideas of what is scientific and its application to our understanding ourselves as social beings have been woven into our culture and way of thinking. The dominance of logical positivism and empiricism in the 20th century right up to the 1960s suggested that anything not grounded in empirical, repeatable observation should be rejected and was ‘unscientific’. The high regard for natural sciences by the logical positivists led to its reification and the view of social sciences as a lower form of academic pursuit. Popper’s refining of logical positivism established an ideology that scientific method required theory and that theory must be refutable. Good scientific theory is a prohibition (Ebringer, 2011). Such a philosophy underpins much of IS research in which hypotheses are proposed and then declared true or false as a result of the statistical analysis of surveys. Critical to the logical positivism view of scientific endeavour was a stripping of context and time. Science practice was seen as ahistorical (Okasha, 2002). Positivism sought to strip philosophy itself of reflection and metaphysics and make it more ‘scientific’. However, as logical empiricism disintegrated; it was understood that science is far from a simply neutral and objective process. Rather it is influenced by history, context and is strongly political. Kuhn’s (2012) The Structure of Scientific Revolutions opened the debate on the nature of science and its practice; something reflected in sociological treatments such as Latour’s (1988) Science in Action. The underlying belief or rather worldview which sees science and scientific ‘method’ as the sole arbiter for thinking and acting has not only persisted but grown in academia. In business schools, a dominant scientific model including abstract financial and economic analysis, statistical multiple regressions, and laboratory psychology (Bennis and O’Toole, 2005) not only excluded exploration of alternatives but rendered research irrelevant to practice and devoid of political and economic context. The questioning of whether IS is a science only reflects debates in business schools or in economics departments where the failure to predict the recent financial crisis despite a plethora of mathematical models raised severe doubts as to the scientific credentials of economics (Wang, 2013). The afterglow of positivist philosophy permeates popular culture: ‘Philosophy is dead . . . scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge’ according to Hawking and Mlodinow (2010). This dominant paradigm subordinates social sciences as secondclass citizens below the natural sciences and creates an ambition to rise to the standards of natural science in our study of IS. And yet as the paradigm of the scientific method frays at the edge as Kuhn predicted, more and more effort is made to ignore problems or explain away the inadequacies of the scientific method in social sciences. The authors’ treatment of natural sciences and questioning what we believe in natural science is one such attempt. If efforts to achieve our ambition to raise social science to the level of respect accorded natural sciences in our society is failing our response will be to reinterpret natural sciences. If we apparently cannot raise our status to that of Human in the loop