Generating and grounding prescriptive knowledge

Abstract

Design science research (DSR) has been advocated for combining relevance and rigor and is socio-technical by nature. Yet most articles in the digital government field focus on the resulting design artifacts, presenting only methodologies and evaluations, and generating limited actionable, generalizable design knowledge. This editorial analyzes multiple approaches to advancing the development of prescriptive design principles and policy statements. The generation and rationale of prescriptive knowledge are discussed, along with various forms of design knowledge evaluation, to facilitate its connection to specific contexts. Three foundational propositions are presented to identify orienting strategies for developing prescriptive knowledge, explain its underlying rationale, and evaluate design knowledge. An integrative framework for generating and grounding prescriptive knowledge in line with the classical DSR paradigm is developed. This framework provides the basis for researchers to make generalizable knowledge contributions to the field using DSR.