2007/09/11: What is IS research?
Summary of:
; ; "The Identity Crisis Within the IS Discipline: Defining and Communicating the Discipline's Core Properties", MIS Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2003) pp. 183-194.
This is a well written plea to the IS community which reminds me of Webster & Watson's in that its goal is to strengthen the field of IS by focusing the attention of researchers on the needs of the field. Where Webster & Watson ask researchers to look at other, more mature fields, and to see and acknowledge the importance of literature reviews in propelling and focusing research, Benbasat & Zmud ask a more fundamental question: just what is it that we're doing here, anyway?
Their models for "What is IS research?" seem heavily based on socio-technical systems theory: the interaction between humans and organizations and technology. The crucial point they make is that the primary purpose of IS is to study IT as an enabling agent; what we study are the relationships between the IT artifact, the organization (possibly society) and the individuals within it, and how each of them can be changed to improve the others. [ Read More ... ]