Contextuality and Information Systems: how the interplay between paradigms can help

The Information System research is plagued by the ubiquitous problem of contexuality. That is, while studying any phenomenon, a researcher needs to ascertain the extent to which his findings are skewed towards the specific context his data drives from, and how much they can transcend and hold true across different contexts.

I put together a paper ( with Dr Sawyer) for iConference that seeks to shed light on practices of two dominant epistemological paradigms (positivist vs. interpretivist), and comes up with a model which incorporates their upsides regarding the contextuality problem. Although it is mainly oriented  toward Information Systems research, I believe its line of reasoning would be illustrative for other soft disciplines which wrestle with the same set of difficulties.
To download the paper, click here.