Critical Realism and Mechanisms: Moving from the Philosophical to the Empirical in the Search for Causal Explanations

Critical Realism (CR) has recently emerged as a philosophical and methodological alternative for conducting information systems research. In order to fully leverage CR, researchers must have a clear conceptual and empirical understanding of causal mechanisms and their relationship to the organizational, social, and technological structures existing in a given research setting. Unfortunately, the mechanism concept has proved to be somewhat ambiguous. The proposed panel will address these mechanisms in general, and affordances as a specific type of mechanism which has particular value in IS research. The four panelists will discuss mechanisms from four distinct but interrelated perspectives to provide interested IS researchers with several approaches for conducting empirical critical realist research.