What is it about?
Current business and social environment rapdily changes in terms of its nature, because of disruptive technologies, changing individuals' values or social norms, etc. While established theories provide useful lens to make sense new phenomenon or observations, it is not always applicable, requiring generating completely new explanation or revising existing ones (e.g., how can we define the structure of conjoined agency with technology, namley, AI, when we use it for high-stake decision?). To generate new explanation, Charles Peirce introduced abduction as the third type of scientific inference to understand anomaly but abduction has remained broad idea, lacking systematic procedure to apply it for scentific research. This study proposes actionable guidance to use abduction as main inference approach, adding coding technique.
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Why is it important?
Our proposed method of abductive theorizing increases applicablity of abduction especially for whom they want to generate new or creative theories, providing actionable procedure. In addition, it calls for the importance of abduction as main inference approach in Information System research which has higlighted generating native theories.
Perspectives
We hope this article increases the interest of diverse research approach beyond traditional script and provides useful material for whom they want to apply creative method to understand current business or social phenomena.
Eunyoung Kim
Hanyang University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Unleashing the Power of Abductive Theorizing: A Practical Guide, ACM SIGMIS Database the DATABASE for Advances in Information Systems, July 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3822165.3822170.
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