This one was harder than I would have thought, and it was really hard for me to start. I’ve been going without much sleep for the last two days because my daughter is sick and has been up many times a night, and also I’ve had some crises to deal with at work. As such, I’ve not been studying or writing, and I lost my momentum. I got it back towards the end of page two.

I actually started this, and just couldn’t go past the first paragraph. I had to go back and review all my notes for action science. And then a few times (especially for caveats regarding action science, the political nature of action science, and evaluating action science), I had to stop writing and go back to my notes.

I am still not sure how action science is evaluated. “How does one evaluate action research” was a question from a prior year. I’ve never seen it written up anywhere, but I guess if I were pressed I could take two tacks: first, use the three guidelines (solves a real problem for the context, returns valuable findings back to the context, links theory to practice); second, evaluate validity concerns like one would do for flexible research, esp. case studies. I would imagine that action research papers come out like a cross between narrative and case study.

I say (because I read this in the CAIS paper) that action science papers are long, but what about “Informating the clan?” That was MISQ length, but I wonder if it was detailed enough. Possibly. Maybe I should say that action science papers “can be long.”

I should definitely include the kinds of things that one might use action research for in IS: organizational change, system design, scientific research, training (CAIS paper). There are also levels of participation for the researcher: collaborative, facilitative and expert