Special Issue on Action Research in Information Systems : Making is Research Relevant to Practice

Why action research and information systems?There have been frequent calls for IS researchers to make their research more relevant to practice (Zmund 1998), yet it seems IS researchers continue to struggle to make excellent research practically relevant. We believe action research methods provide one potential avenue to improve the practical relevance of IS research. Action research has been accepted as a valid research method in other applied fields such as organization development and education. (e.g., Carr and Kemnis 1986; Elden and Chisholm 1993; Van Eynde and Bledsoe 1990). It has been described as :the touchstone of most good organizational development practice" and "remains the primary methodology for the practice of organizational development" (Van Eynde and Bledsoe 1990, p. 27). We see no reason why action research should not be accepted in the field of information systems....This Special Issue is an editorial publicly available on the MIS Quarterly webpage https://www.jstor.org/stable/25148642