quantification of critical social theory

Abstract

This study presents a way to provide more rigorous theoretical foundation for critical social theory by quantifying its concept. Critical social theory is one of qualitative research methodologies used in IS research. Critical social theory assumes that social reality is historically constituted and that it is produced and reproduced by people. Although people can consciously act to change their social and economic circumstances, critical social theory recognizes that their ability to do so is constrained by various forms of social, cultural and political domination. The main purpose of critical social theory is seen as being one of social critique, whereby the restrictive and alienating conditions of the status quo are brought to light. However exposing domination and alienation was done through studies done in a qualitative way, which might be regarded as subjective and not scientific enough. Even though the concept proposed by Habermas on communicative actions was used in IS research, those researches did not utilize the fundamental assumption of all critical social theories regardless of scholars. No IS researchers attempted to link the problem of domination and alienation in modern society with IS research. I believe that the reason was probably due to lack of rigorous theoretical argument to crystallize the relevance of the fundamental issue of critical social theory. It was almost never tried to explain something that is purely qualitative in a quantitative model in IS research. However this study shows that by devising a mathematical model, quantification of a qualitative theory is possible and also very useful in gaining new insight which was not found in qualitative works. Productivity of a business is defined as output divided by input. As information systems are added to the business in the right way, we expect that productivity will go up. Input can be composed of Labor cost plus Material cost. When new information system investment is made, the new Input will be composed of Labor cost plus Information System cost plus Material cost. If the same output is produced after the new IS investment, which is often true in most real-life cases, we can have a mathematical modeling: This formula indicates that the difference between labor costs when a new IS investment is made has to be larger than the investment cost. In other words more IS investment cost means the bigger layoffs of workers which must bring the larger difference between labor costs.