The Role of the Researcher in New Information Infrastructure Research contextualist research eschews generalizability in favour of a descriptive and analytical under- standing of the concerns, beliefs, and practices of particular contexts (Lee & Baskerville, 2003). Yet contextualists argue that generalized knowledge is far too removed from any specific context to be immediately relevant, and to shape it towards very different interpretive, political, and ethical worlds would be difficult. Giddens (1984, pp.42) supports this claim by stating, "[t]he problem in the study of human activity is that every attempt at a context-free definition of an action, that is, a definition based on abstract rules or laws, will not necessarily accord with the pragmatic way an action is defined by the actors in a concrete social situation." In other words, generalized knowledge fails to directly inform and direct practitioners who find the remoteness of theoretical language and generalized rules-of-thumb to lack immediate relevance to their everyday practices (Lee, 1999). world. As such, these theoretical constructs are not immediately relevant to the practice fields from which they were drawn. In particular, Bennis and O'Toole (2005) suggest that scientific rigor (i.e. episteme) has dominated relevance. They ask "why have business schools embraced the scientific model of physicists and economists rather than the professional model of doctors and lawyers?" 2 (Bennis & O'Toole, 2005, pp. 96). They argue that, business schools should focus more on technical knowledge and professional skills (i.e. techne), and, likewise, social science and organizational research should focus on how such knowledge and skills are acquired and nurtured in practice. Techne is the form of knowledge that prac- titioners are most interested in and refers to the production of skills together with the tools and artifacts that are required for their expression (Flyvbjerg, 2001). Some areas of IS research have focused on a generalized form of techne