Many Design Science Research (DSR) papers in Information Systems (IS) suggest sets of design principles (DPs) that provide knowledge for creating instances, in different contexts, of IT artifacts that belong to the same class. However, despite frameworks for evaluating DSR contributions, the evaluation of DP reusability to, with and for practitioners has been largely neglected. We suggest that in order to maintain the practical relevance of DSR, papers with DPs as their key outcomes should contain a reusability evaluation of the proposed principles.We propose a framework of minimum reusability evaluation of DPs by members of the target community of practitioners. The framework comprises five criteria:(1) accessibility, (2) importance, (3) novelty and insightfulness, (4) actability and guidance, and (5) effectiveness.

In accounts of institutional change, discursive institutionalists point to the role of economic and political ideas in upending institutional stability and providing the raw material for the establishment of a new institutional setup. This approach has typically entailed a conceptualisation of ideas as coherent and monolithic and actors as almost automatically following the precepts of the ideas they hold and support. Recent theorising stresses how ideas are in fact composite and heterogeneous, and actors pragmatic and strategic in how they employ ideas in political struggles. However, this change of focus has, until recently, not included how foundational ideas of a polity, often referred to as ‘public philosophies’, are theorised to impact on institution‐building. Drawing on French Pragmatic Sociology, and taking as a starting point recent efforts within discursive institutionalism to conceptualise the dynamic nature of public philosophies, this article seeks to foreground moral justification in accounts of ideational and institutional change. It suggests that public philosophies are reflexively used by actors in continual processes of normative justification that may produce significant policy shifts over time. The empirical relevance of the argument is demonstrated through an analysis of gradual ideational and institutional change in French labour market policy, specifically the development from the state‐guaranteed minimum income scheme of 1988 to the neoliberal make‐work‐pay logic of the 2009 scheme, Revenu de solidarité active. The analysis shows that public and moral justifications have underpinned and gradually shaped these radical changes.

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The close ties between modes of governing, subjectivities and critique in contemporary societies challenge the role of critical social research. The classical normative ethos of the unmasking researcher unravelling various oppressive structures of dominant vs. dominated groups in society is inadequate when it comes to understand de-politicizing mechanisms and the struggles they bring about. This article argues that only a non-normative position can stay attentive to the constant and complex evolution of modes of governing and the critical operations actors themselves engage in. The article outlines a non-normative but critical programme based on an ethos of re-politicizing contemporary pervasive modes of governing. The analytical advantages and limitations of such a programme are demonstrated by readings of both Foucauldian studies and the works of and debates regarding the French pragmatic sociology of Boltanski and Thévenot.

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In a Scandinavian company developing a healthcare information system (IS) at three Scandinavian sites they succeeded in taking agile processes into use across the three sites. After a fourth development site in India was added the use of agile development processes gradually came to an end and plan-driven processes took over. In this paper we report from a month-long study where our analysis of the case shows that the cause for giving up agile was threefold: (1) The cultural distance between India and Scandinavia was too great. (2) There were telling differences in competence and (3) the presence of knowledge asymmetry. From this analysis we develop a grounded theory explaining the necessary preconditions for succeeding with a global process for agile IS development.

Accumulating prescriptive design knowledge, such as design principles (DP), is one of the fundamental goals in design science research projects. As previous studies have examined the use of DPs in practice to advance the development and communication of such principles, we argue that this attention also needs to be paid to how and for what researchers (re-)use DPs. Hence, this paper explores DP usage in cumulative (information systems) research based on the analysis and coding of a sample of 114 articles with 226 in-text citations. In doing this, we aim at contributing to the valuable discourse on DP reuse and accumulation by focusing on usage in research, present preliminary types of DP usage extracted from cumulative literature, as well as raise the awareness for guiding user and designer in how to (re-)use and how to allow for reuse of DPs.

The European Social Dialogue (ESD) is a mixed story of ongoing negotiations between the social partners but with rather few binding agreements. Whereas some see the sparse actions as an inevitable consequence of deep structural and political asymmetries, others have pointed out the key role played by the Commission, as a “shadow of hierarchy”, in pushing the social partners towards binding agreements. By applying novel insights from theories of veto players and asymmetric interdependence to an in-depth case study of two agreements, the article is the first attempt to take a systematic game theoretical approach to the study of the ESD. We show that the likelihood of a binding agreement depends on the degree and changeability of the shadow of hierarchy as well as the complexity of issue and reputational risks of the social partners. The findings have implications for the likely effectiveness of the recent attempt to “re-launch” the ESD.