Intersubjectivty in Interpretive Research: The Dialogical Case

In this paper the concept of intersubjectivity as it is employed in Information Systems research is reviewed from the perspective of dialogism developed in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin. A form of communicative understanding is presupposed in most IS analytic activities; intersubjectivity is the general criteria for interpretive studies that are acclaimed by the attempt to understand phenomena according to the meanings that people assign to them. Typically, it is said to be achieved empathetically by the generation of shared interpretations of the actions, practices and objects within the cultural systems that give them significance. The quality of engagement between participants is increasingly regarded as a key element in successful IT development, for example Participant Design, Joint Application Development, cooperative and interpretive methodologies, all recommend that system development is enhanced by user participation, albeit in varying degrees of involvement, and authenticity of analytic categories is assured in common understanding. In Bakhtin’s dialogic concept, this engagement, though welcome, is not an option but an epistemological requirement. However, the convergence of understanding in shared alterity (otherness) is radically resisted, and there is an insistence that difference must always exist for meaning to have any authenticity. This implies a rejection of both the foundationalism of the Other’s viewpoint, as well as the notion of synthesis found in many reports of intersubjectivity. Instead of privileging the understanding of one or another person, whereby one agent (the informant) possesses knowledge or truth and the other (the researcher) acquires it, a focus on the interaction between the two is recommended. Interpretivism and hermeneutics are understood as a response to the other, a ‘giving-meaning-to’ the alterity presented by an other culture or person’s understanding and action rather than an overcoming of the difference presented by the Other.