Enabling a Kleinian integration of interpretivist and socio‐critical IS research: the contribution of Dooyeweerd's philosophy

This paper suggests how interpretivist, socio‐critical and positivist approaches in information systems (IS) research might be integrated. Heinz Klein's approach to IS was a significant advance on earlier ones, bringing together a number of issues discussed in interpretivist and socio‐critical circles, with philosophical groundings. He believed IS research would benefit from integration of interpretivist and socio‐critical approaches, but found no philosophical grounding for this. Interpretivism's reluctance to consider normativity might be a ‘Trojan horse’ that undermines integration. This paper employs Dooyeweerd's philosophy to expose and expel the Trojan horse and sketch how a philosophically grounded integration of interpretivist, socio‐critical and even positivist approaches might proceed.