Scholarship and practice: the contribution of ethnographic research methods to bridging the gap

Introduction Research methods are the means by which knowledge is acquired and constructed within a discipline. Research methods need to be both relevant and rigorous in order to be accepted as legitimate within a particular field of knowledge. Information systems (IS) is a field which has multiple stakeholders in its knowledge development, operating in contexts which have to deal with multiplicity, cross-linkage, diversity and continually emerging changes, demanding integration as a key perspective. The diversity needs to be applauded rather than denied, even in the customarily slow-to-change world of research. The stakeholders in IS research include scholars, practitioners, educationists, users, politicians, economists and citizens (present and future). In this article, the authors concentrate on the conflicts of objectives between scholars and practitioners as stakeholder groups in IS research, looking at how the differences exposed can show areas of potential integration and can point the way to choosing both relevant and rigorous research methods. It is an assumption of this article that there is a gap between the process of knowledge generation conducted by researchers and that conducted by practitioners. The authors seek to show how ethnography provides the principles to support both groups, hence bridging the gap. The purpose of the article is to show how ethnographic research methods can generate knowledge which is useful to both practice and scholarship.