Reflecting on Technology: An Activity Based Approach to Evaluation

The evaluation of Information Systems (IS) has been and remains a thorny issue for both IS practitioners and researches. This paper contributes the understanding of this issue in a number of ways: a. it provides a paradigmatic review of relevant literature discussing the contributions of three primary communities: interpretive, positivist and critical; b. it explores how critical theory, aligned with activity theory, can provide a practical and coherent theoretical underpinning for IS evaluation; c. it discusses how critical theory can provide an ontological and epistemological underpinning for methodological pluralism in evaluation research and practice; and activity theory makes explicit agency and structure and the relationship between the two; d. The primary contribution of this work is the description of an activity based three stage model for evaluation (which can be used both by researchers and practitioners) which is illustrated by drawing on data from three public sector cases.