Critical Realism and Mechanisms: Moving from the Philosophical to the Empirical in the Search for Causal Explanations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Critical Realism (CR) has recently emerged as a philosophical and methodological alternative for conducting information systems research. In order to fully leverage CR, researchers must have a clear conceptual and empirical understanding of causal mechanisms and their relationship to the organizational, social, and technological structures existing in a given research setting. Unfortunately, the mechanism concept has proved to be somewhat ambiguous. The proposed panel will address these mechanisms in general, and affordances as a specific type of mechanism which has particular value in IS research. The four panelists will discuss mechanisms from four distinct but interrelated perspectives to provide interested IS researchers with several approaches for conducting empirical critical realist research.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.117 | 0.121 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.013 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.120 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.043 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Research integrity | 0.010 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".