Interpretive accounts and fairy tales: a critical polemic against the empiricist bias in interpretive IS research

Drawing on the philosophical background of interpretivism in hermeneutics and phenomenology, the paper questions the status of empirical research in the interpretivist tradition and compares the role of empirical data in different types of research accounts with fairy tales, noting that interpretive IS research shares at least as many quality features with Fairy tales as with positivist narratives.