Using Narrative Inquiry in a Study of Information Systems Professionals Felix B. Tan The University of Auckland Email: f.tan@auckland.ac.nz M. Gordon Hunter The University of Lethbridge Email: ghunter@uleth.ca Abstract The research reported in this paper employed Narrative Inquiry in an innovative way in a study of the key factors that influence the career paths of information systems (IS) professionals. The interview technique was based upon McCracken’s [1] ‘Long Interview’, which allows the research participants to reflect upon the domain of discourse in a relatively unbiased and free- flowing manner. Individual resumes were employed as the main instrument to guide the interview and to document the narratives. The resumes helped ground the discussion in the IS professionals’ personal experiences, assisted these professionals to reflect upon and report these experiences in a sequential account of events as they transpired throughout their careers. The use of individual resumes framed within McCraken’s ‘Long Interview’ brings a certain amount of structure to the Narrative Inquiry technique, allowing for an in-depth investigation and the gathering of rich biographical personal accounts of the IS professional’s interpretations of specific career path impacts. 1. Introduction Jerome Bruner [2] argues that we construct and organize reality in two basic ways – through paradigms and through narratives. The paradigmatic approach seeks evidence through empirical verification. Its goal is to reduce ambiguity and “its language is regulated by requirements of consistency and noncontradiction” [2, p. 12]. Alternatively, the narrative approach stresses the telling of good stories that are contextually and temporally bound. This approach leads to rich, in-depth understandings. Narrative Inquiry allows the research participant to tell his or her own story. The technique entails the documentation and analysis of individuals’ stories about or personal accounts of a specific domain of discourse. As Swap et al [3] suggest, employing research where participants relate stories about their personal experiences, “… would be more memorable, be given more weight, and be more likely to guide behavior” [3: p.103]. According to Tulving [4] episodic memory relates to events, which have been directly experienced; and it is these events, which are most readily remembered. Narrative has been defined as, “… the symbolic presentation of a sequence of events connected by subject matter and related by time” [5, p.205]. Research employing the narrative approach [6] suggests the sequence of the story elements [7] contribute to the appropriateness of the method. Czarniawska-Joerges [8] further supports the importance of employing a sequential account when employing the narrative approach. Narrative inquiry has been employed extensively in other academic disciplines, such as: behavioral science [9], fiction and film [10], strategic management [11], and organizational studies [8]. Czarniawska-Joerges [8] suggest that narratives are used in organizational studies in three forms: (a) in organizational research written in a storylike form (“tales from the field”), (b) in organizational research collecting organizational stories (“tales of the field”), and (c) in organizational research conceptualising organizational life as story making and organizational theory as story reading (interpretive approaches). Many in the information systems (IS) field agree on the utility of the narrative approach. For example, Hirschheim and Newman [12] employed narrative case studies and have suggested that the role of myth, metaphor and magic are alternative approaches which may assist in improving the understanding and interpreting the social actions of developers and users involved in the development of IS. Boland and Day [13] conducted a series of interviews to document IS Proceedings of the 36th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2003 0-7695-1874-5/03 $17.00 (C) 2003 IEEE 1