| International Federation of Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 8.2 conference entitled “Relevant Theory and Informed Practice: Looking Forward from a 20 Year Perspective on IS Research.” The conference was held at the University of Manchester in Manchester, England, on July 15-17, 2004.
It was during the working group business meeting following the IFIP WG 8.2 working conference in 2001 on “Realigning Research and Practice in Information Systems Development” in Boise, Idaho, that a conference call was approved for a new conference dealing with the alignment of research practice and IS development. Those who proposed the conference had been involved with WG 8.2 and other TC 8 working groups over many years. The initial incentive for developing the theme of the conference dates back to 1997 at the Philadelphia conference. It was observed that while some were celebrating the end of the “methods wars” because some types of qualitative work had become acceptable for publication in mainstream journals, the work by others who were exploring questions outside the managerial, organizational, or technological mainstream, or who were employing innovative research approaches, was still being excluded from the discourse. Thus it was concluded that further attention to the question of research approaches was required.
In a real sense, however, the seeds of this conference were sown in 1984 at the first Manchester conference, when in the proceedings introduction Enid Mumford made a declaration that continues to express a concern of the working group. |