This article discusses the conduct and evaluation of interpretive research in information systems. While the conventions for evaluating information systems case studies conducted according to the natural science model of social science are now widely accepted, this is not the case for interpretive field studies. A set of principles for the conduct and evaluation of interpretive field research in information systems is proposed, along with their philosophical rationale. The usefulness of the principles is illustrated by evaluating three published interpretive field studies drawn from the IS research literature. The intention of the paper is to further reflection and debate on the important subject of grounding interpretive research methodology.

The question that this volume poses—What can social psychology tell us about the Holocaust?—is a difficult and complex one to answer. Perhaps it is fair to begin by saying that the Holocaust has influenced our understanding of social psychology more than the other way around. Early work in the field was directly motivated by the devastation and tragedies that took place between 1933-1945 (e.g., on the Holocaust, see Hilberg, 1973; on Jewish persecution from 1933-39, see Friedländer, 1997; on the Third Reich, see Shirer, 1998). Central topics in social psychology such as attribution, social influence, and intergroup processes all have their roots in the works of thinkers who had the events of the 1930s and 40s seared in their minds, many of whom had to flee their homelands to escape the specter of Nazism. In the 1960s and early 70s, seminal work in the field, such as Milgram's (1974) research on obedience to authority and the Stanford Prison experiment by Zimbardo and his colleagues (Zimbardo, Banks, Haney, & Jaffe, 1973), continued to be motivated by a need to understand the perpetrators of the Holocaust and other acts of collective violence. To this day, these studies represent social psychology's most salient demonstrations of situationism—a core tenet of the field that emphasizes the power of the situational forces over human behavior (see Ross &

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What is the nature of moral behavior? According to the study of bounded rationality, it results not from character traits or rational deliberation alone, but from the interplay between mind and environment. In this view, moral behavior is based on pragmatic social heuristics rather than moral rules or maximization principles. These social heuristics are not good or bad per se, but solely in relation to the environments in which they are used. This has methodological implications for the study of morality: Behavior needs to be studied in social groups as well as in isolation, in natural environments as well as in labs. It also has implications for moral policy: Only by accepting the fact that behavior is a function of both mind and environmental structures can realistic prescriptive means of achieving moral goals be developed.

Abstract: Research on the voters of the extreme right in Western Europe has become a minor industry, but relatively little attention has been paid to the twin question of why support for these parties is often unstable, and why the extreme right is so weak in many countries. Moreover, the findings from different studies often contradict each other. This article aims at providing a more comprehensive and satisfactory answer to this research problem by employing a broader database and a more adequate modeling strategy. The main finding is that while immigration and unemployment rates are important, their interaction with other political factors is much more complex than suggested by previous research. Moreover, persistent country effects prevail even if a whole host of individual and contextual variables is controlled for.

To understand anti-social behavior by individuals, which includes violence, torture and terrorism, I endorse a greater reliance on situational variables and processes than has been traditional in psychology. The dominant dispositional orientation, embedded in a psychology of individualism, focuses on internal factors that people bring into various situations, such as genetic, personality, character, and pathological risk factors. While this perspective is obviously important to appreciating the integrity of individual functioning, it is vital to add an appreciation of the extent to which human actions may come under situational influences that can be quite powerful. Those influences have not been fully recognized within psychology or society in trying to explain unusual or “evil ” behaviors, such as that of the abuses of Iraqi prisoners by United States military police guards at Abu Ghraib Prison. How one understands the root causes of such behaviors then impacts treatment and prevention strategies. This view has both influenced and been informed by a body of social psychological research and theory. The situationist approach is to the dispositional as public health models of disease are to medical models. It follows basic

(or: why AI characters should be just as screwed-up as we are) Historically, AI research has understandably focused on those aspects of cognition that distinguish humans from other animals – in particular, our capacity for complex problem solving. However, with a few notable exceptions, narratives in popular media generally focus on those aspects of human experience that we share with other social animals: attachment, mating and child rearing, violence, group affiliation, and inter-group and inter-individual conflict. Moreover, the stories we tell often focus on the ways in which these processes break down. In this paper, I will argue that current agent architectures don’t offer particularly good models of these phenomena, and discuss specific phenomena that I think it would be illuminating to understand at a computational level.

Daphna Canetti-Nisim is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Haifa

ABSTRACT. This study explores the prevalence of AIDS and cancer stigma as influenced by attitude toward homosexuality, religiosity, authoritarianism, and androgyny. This study used a quasi-experimental survey design (N = 485) to examine attitude toward people with AIDS and cancer, and interaction with people with AIDS and cancer. Negative attitudes toward homosexuality, high religious intensity and ideology, high authoritarianism, and low expressive emerged as factors related to more negative attitudes toward people with AIDS and unwillingness to interact with people with AIDS. Attitudes toward people with cancer were generally not related to the variables. Findings explore how to campaign efforts to reduce existing negative attitudes toward AIDS and homosexuality, given that gay men with AIDS are especially stigmatized. Implications and directions for future research are discussed, especially for interventions.[Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth

I herby declare that this thesis contains no materials accepted for any other degrees in any other institutions. This thesis contains no materials previously written and / published by another person, unless otherwise noted. __________________________