No exit? Intellectual integrity under the regime of ‘evidence’ and ‘best‐practices’

Murray, Stuart J.; Holmes, Dave; Perron, Amélie; Rail, Geneviève

doi:10.1111/j.1365-2753.2007.00851.x

Cited by 56 publications

(101 citation statements)

References 11 publications

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“…At the top are quantitative, positivist methods (in the form of randomized controlled trials) while case studies and qualitative methods are at the bottom (Tranfield et al, 2003;Pawson, 2006;Denyer and Tranfield, 2009). Privileging particular studies (as high quality evidence) based on their approach and method, however, introduces a particular systematic bias, thus contradicting SLR's major claim to non-bias (Murray et al, 2007). Some SLR authors have thus argued that SLRs need to change to also include the extensive body of nonpositivist research in the social sciences (Denyer and Tranfield, 2009) and IS (Oates, 2011;Oates et al, 2012).…”

Section: Systematic Literature Reviews (Slrs)mentioning

confidence: 91%

On being ‘Systematic’ in Literature Reviews in IS

Boell

Ćećez-Kecmanović

2015

Journal of Information Technology

269

206

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General guidelines for conducting literature reviews often do not address the question of literature searches and dealing with a potentially large number of identified sources. These issues are specifically addressed by so-called systematic literature reviews (SLRs) that propose a strict protocol for the search and appraisal of literature. Moreover, SLRs are claimed to be a 'standardized method' for literature reviews that is replicable, transparent, objective, unbiased and rigorous, and thus superior to other approaches for conducting literature reviews. These are significant and consequential claims that -despite increasing adoption of SLRs -remained largely unnoticed in the information systems (IS) literature. The objective of this debate is to draw attention of the IS community to SLR's claims, to question their justification and reveal potential risks of their adoption. This is achieved by first examining the origins of SLR and the prescribed SLR process and then by critically assessing their claims and implications. In this debate, we show that SLRs are applicable and useful for a very specific kind of literature review, a meta study that identifies and summarizes evidence from earlier research. We also demonstrate that the claims that SLRs provide superior quality are not justified. More importantly, we argue that SLR as a general approach to conducting literature reviews is highly questionable, concealing significant perils. The paper cautions that SLR could undermine critical engagement with literature and what it means to be scholarly in academic work.

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Section: Systematic Literature Reviews (Slrs)mentioning

confidence: 91%

On being ‘Systematic’ in Literature Reviews in IS

Boell

Ćećez-Kecmanović

2015

Journal of Information Technology

269

206

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“…A growing body of critical literature exists on the emergence of EBM, and the centrality of RCTs to guiding epidemiological and clinical interventions (Ashcroft, 2004;Mykhalovskiy and Weir, 2004;Holmes et al, 2006;Murray et al, 2007;Dumit, 2012). These critiques typically do not call for abandoning EBM (see, however, Walker, 2009), but rather focus attention on its sometimes unintended and even paradoxical consequences.…”

Section: The Rct's 'Logic' and Authoritymentioning

confidence: 98%

Surveying risk subjects: Public health surveys as instruments of biomedicalization

Norton

2013

BioSocieties

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In recent years, epidemiologists have conducted dozens of surveys asking men around the world if they would be willing to be circumcised to reduce their HIV-risk. Men's responses in turn constitute an important factor in predicting the overall success of circumcision campaigns. Whereas researchers often position survey responses as passive reflections of attitudes, my analysis reveals a more complex picture. The reviewed surveys invite men to consider a part of their bodies as posing a risk to themselves, their partners or their communities, and its removal as a means to permanently transition from the 'high' to the 'low' risk category. In the process, they position some bodies as inherently riskier than others, thereby carving out new HIV-risk subject positions based not on identity or behavior, but the body itself. Because claims about what one can do to mitigate the spread of HIV are not easily disentangled from what one ought to do, I suggest that these surveys simultaneously imbue willingness to be circumcised with a sense of ethical obligation. In doing so, I argue that circumcision-willingness surveys constitute a discursive technology integral to male circumcision's emergence as an HIV-risk reduction strategy, not simply a tool that identifies willing subjects passively awaiting the next public health intervention.

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“…This is the self that medical ethics typically presumes as foundational: rational, autonomous, and freely able to consent. In what follows, I am highly critical of this "self," and I am equally suspicious of the evidence-based movement in medicine and the so-called "best practice guidelines" that have come to define "self-care" in the biomedical management of this self [6-9]. In contradistinction, I shall propose a second model of care that I borrow from Foucault's ethics – "care of the self."…”

Section: Background: Questioning the Good Lifementioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this section, I have argued that neo-liberalism founders for similar reasons; but in a more sinister twist, we are invited to discover an ethics of neo-liberalism in its presumed ethical neutrality – that is, neo-liberalism pretends to be ethically neutral by recasting reason, autonomy, and freedom as parameters of an independently fair and objectively equitable market. This, too, is a ruse, but of greater magnitude [5,9,19]. …”

Section: The Ideology Of Self-carementioning

confidence: 99%

Care and the self: biotechnology, reproduction, and the good life

Murray

2007

Philos Ethics Humanit Med

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This paper explores a novel philosophy of ethical care in the face of burgeoning biomedical technologies. I respond to a serious challenge facing traditional bioethics with its roots in analytic philosophy. The hallmarks of these traditional approaches are reason and autonomy, founded on a belief in the liberal humanist subject. In recent years, however, there have been mounting challenges to this view of human subjectivity, emerging from poststructuralist critiques, such as Michel Foucault's, but increasingly also as a result of advances in biotechnology itself. In the face of these developments, I argue that the theoretical relevance and practical application of mainstream bioethics is increasingly under strain. Traditionalists will undoubtedly resist. Together, professional philosopher-bioethicists, public health policymakers, and the global commercial healthcare industry tend to respond conservatively by shoring up the liberal humanist subject as the foundation for medical ethics and consumer decision-making, appealing to the familiar tropes of reason, autonomy, and freedom.I argue for a different approach to bioethics, and work towards a new way to conceive of ethical relations in healthcare--one that does not presume a sovereign subject as the basis of dignity, personhood or democracy. Instead, I am critical of the narrow instantiations of reason, autonomy, and freedom, which, more recently, have been co-opted by a troubling neo-liberal politics of the self. Thus, I am critical of current trends in medical ethics, often running in tandem with corporate-governmental models of efficiency, accountability, and so-called evidence-based best practices. As an example of such market-driven conceptions of subjectivity, I discuss the paradigm of "self-care." Self-care shores up the traditional view of the self as a free agent. In this sense, self-care is looked upon favourably by mainstream bioethics in its focus on autonomy, while healthcare policy endorses this model for ideological and economic reasons. To contrast this, I propose a different model of care together with a different model of selfhood. Here I develop and apply Foucault's late work on the "care of the self." In this understanding of "care," I suggest that we might work towards an ethical self that is more commensurable both with recent theoretical views on subjectivity and--more pressingly--with the challenges of emergent biotechnologies. I end this paper with a discussion on ethical parenthood, which offers a practical reading of the "care of the self" in relation to new reproductive technologies (NRTs).

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No exit? Intellectual integrity under the regime of ‘evidence’ and ‘best‐practices’

Cited by 56 publications

References 11 publications

On being ‘Systematic’ in Literature Reviews in IS

On being ‘Systematic’ in Literature Reviews in IS

Surveying risk subjects: Public health surveys as instruments of biomedicalization

Care and the self: biotechnology, reproduction, and the good life

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