Information Systems - The State of the Field
.pdf284 Reach and Grasp
Culnan, M. J., and Huff, S. L. (1996): ‘Back to the Future: Will There Be an ICIS in 1996?,’ in Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems, L. Maggi, R. Zmud, and J. Wetherbe (Eds.), San Diego, CA, p. 352.
Dearden J. (1972): ‘MIS is a Mirage’, Harvard Business Review, January–February, 90–99. DeSanctis, G. (2003): ‘The Social Life of Information Systems Research: A Response to Benbasat and Zmud’s Call for Returning to the IT Artifact.’ Journal of the AIS,
Volume 4 Article 16 December.
Duffy, E. (1995): Horizontal violence: a conundrum for nursing. Collegian. Journal of the Royal College of Nursing Australia. 2(2), 5–17, April.
Keen, P. G. W. (1980): ‘MIS Research: Reference Disciplines and a Cumulative Tradition,’ Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information Systems, pp. 9–18.
Lyytinen K. and King J. (2004): ‘Nothing At The Center?: Academic Legitimacy in the Information Systems Field’, Accepted for publication, Journal of AIS.
Kling, R. (1980): ‘Social issues and impacts of computing: From arena to discipline’, In Human Choice and Computers, 2, A. Mowshowitz, Ed., North-Holland, Amsterdam, pp. 146–155.
Kuhn, T. (1996): The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Chicago University Press, 3rd edition, Chicago.
Latour, B. (1987): Science in Action. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. and Woolgar S. (1979): Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts, Beverly Hills: Sage.
Mason R. (2004): ‘The Legacy of LEO: Lessons Learned from an English Tea and Cake Company’s Pioneering Efforts in Information Systems’, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, forthcoming.
Mumford E., Hirschheim R., Fitzgerald G., Wood-Harper T. (eds) (1985): Information System Research Methods, North Holland, Amsterdam.
Orlikowski W. & Iacono S (2001), ‘Desperately Seeking the “IT” in IT research—a call to theorizing the IT artifact’, Information Systems Research, June 2001, pp. 121–134.
Popper K. (1968): Conjectures and Refutations, Harper & Row.
Simon H. (1991): Models of My Life, Basic Books, New York.
Stowell F., Mingers J. (1997): ‘Information Systems: an Emerging Discipline?—an Introduction’, in Stowell F, Mingers J. (eds), Information Systems: An Emerging Disicpline, McGraw Hill.
Stove, D. (1982): Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, Pergamon.
Straub D. (1999): A question to Senior Editors of Leading IS Journals, IS world posting, July.
Suchman M. (1995): ‘Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches’,
Academy of Management Review, 20, 3, pp. 571–610.
Toulmin S. (1958): Uses of Argument, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Traweek, S. (1992): Beamtimes and Lifetimes: The World of High Energy Physicists.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Weber R. (2003): ‘Still desperately seeking the IT artifact’, Editors Comments MISQ, 27, 2, pp. iii–xi.
Commentaries
12
The Artifact Redux: Further Reflections on the ‘IT’ in IT Research
Wanda J. Orlikowski and C. Suzanne Iacono
We welcome the opportunity to reflect and comment on our paper, ‘Desperately Seeking the “IT” in IT Research: A Call to Theorizing the IT Artifact’ (Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001). In particular, we would like to use this occasion to clarify our intent in writing the paper and to reaffirm the implications entailed in the paper’s conclusion, while also reflecting on some of the reactions evoked by readings of our paper.
CLARIFYING INTENT
If one looks over time, across application contexts and domains of study, a persistent theme of research in the IS community is the study of emerging information technologies. As John King put it when he was editor of Information Systems Research: ‘What unites the information systems community is a shared interest in a phenomenal event— the rise and consequences of radical improvement in information technology’ (King, 1993, p. 293). We agree with this formulation, and this is reflected in our claim that the IT artifact is a critical intellectual focus for the field (Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001). With this claim, we intend to suggest that emerging IT artifacts are the persistent meaningful forms of entrée into the research of most everyone in our community—whether the focus is decision-support systems, MRP systems, groupware, ERP systems, inter-organizational systems,
288 The Artifact Redux
email, the Internet, mobile technologies, eCommerce auctions, outsourced transaction systems, online reputation systems, etc.
We continue to believe that the IT artifact is a distinctive element of our field, binding together multiple heterogeneous elements of hardware, software, humans and institutions. However, this should not be understood as an exclusive focus on the materiality of technology. Indeed, in our paper we emphasized how the IT artifact is critically constituted by human, social, economic and historical elements. And we argued that a focus on the IT artifact entails a detailed examination of, among other things, computational capabilities, cultural meanings, human skills, social relations, economic impacts, political interests, local and global contexts, institutional influences, temporal patterns, transformational possibilities, and historical consequences (2001, pp. 131–3). Given the complex, multi-faceted and dynamic nature of emerging information technologies, we believe that the various disciplinary interests of our community—be they economic, sociological, psychological or computational—can and should be brought to bear on producing new knowledge about the IT artifact.
By focusing attention on the IT artifact, we did not suggest that activities around conceptualizing or theorizing the artifact should constitute the only work of the field or that research that did not include such a focus was somehow illegitimate or irrelevant. What we did do was point to what appears to be a blind spot in our field, and that is that despite our common interest in information technology, much of our research takes it for granted or ignores it when conducting empirical investigations or building theoretical models.
We respect the interests of all researchers to choose what they wish to focus on in their research practices. The major point of our paper was to highlight what we see as a missed opportunity for our field, to generate specific knowledge about IT phenomena—knowledge that we believe the IS research community is uniquely positioned to contribute. Our interest was, and continues to be, to encourage attention to this central, under-theorized aspect of our research, not to delimit the phenomenon of study or exclude anyone from the community.
To this end, we convened a panel on conceptualizing the IT artifact at the 2002 ICIS in Barcelona. We invited scholars representing the various views on the IT artifact articulated in our paper (i.e., tool, proxy, computational, and ensemble) to discuss how they might engage the artifact more actively in their research. The session was lively, stimulating, and generative. The four scholars (Mary Culnan, Vijay Gurbaxani, Helmut Krcmar and Dan Robey) offered both creative and valuable conceptualizations of the IT artifact from their different perspectives, effectively demonstrating that it is possible to think about and theorize the IT artifact in various meaningful and novel ways.
Reaffirming Implications 289
REAFFIRMING IMPLICATIONS
In the latter part of our original paper, we offered some proposals for how researchers may begin to engage the IT artifact more seriously in their research studies. In particular, we encouraged an opening up of the black box of technology, suggesting explicit consideration of the import and implications of the assumptions, algorithms, structures, and logics embedded in and underlying the various technological systems such as ERP, online auctions, data mining, reputation systems, statistical analyses, collaborative tools, browsers, search tools, software agents, spyware, viruses, etc. These technological contents are rarely discussed by technology vendors and are not always observed or understood by technology users. Yet their operation can have powerful intended and unintended consequences, affecting shortand long-term organizational, economic and societal outcomes.
A focus on embedded systems has been a feature of IS research for decades, with Rob Kling serving as one of the pioneers in developing this focus (Kling and Dutton, 1982; Kling and Scacchi, 1981; Kling etal., 2003). This has been an important contribution to our knowledge of information technologies, but additional work is needed. An embedded perspective is focused primarily on the ways in which technological artifacts and infrastructures are embedded in the social realm. We believe that an equally important perspective should focus on the social preferences, choices, and policies that are inscribed into the technological artifacts (e.g., into interfaces, protocols, programs, standards, mechanisms, and procedures) by artifact designers, builders, and implementers. Thus, technological artifacts are not only embedded within social worlds, but social worlds are also inscribed into the artifacts (Akrich, 1992; Bowker and Star, 1999). And these inscriptions have real implications for such matters as human relationships and interactions, social and organizational effectiveness, economic costs and benefits, as well as issues of privacy, security, safety, reliability, legality and fairness.
While this important point has been made many times by many other scholars, its implications for IS research remain central, and relatively unexplored. Sociologists of technology have long explored the intermingling of humans and technology (Berg, 1997; Callon, 1987; Latour, 1987), while scholars such as Lucy Suchman (1994, 1995) and Batya Friedman (1997) have been writing about the categories and values built into technology designs for over a decade. Similarly, Lawrence Lessig’s writings (1999, 2001) about embedded ‘code’ have become popular among legal scholars and lay people interested in the ‘new’ architectures of cyberspace and their legal and ethical
290 The Artifact Redux
entailments. For IS researchers, the implications are significant: if we are to develop and explain technologies that are useful to humans, institutions, and society, we need to better understand how the contents and contexts of technological artifacts influence their use and consequences. And vice versa.
REFLECTING ON READINGS
We have welcomed the range of reactions to our 2001 paper as we feel that deliberation about and discussion of these issues are critical opportunities for us all to reflect on our own assumptions, values, interests and identities, as well as those of the field we collectively construct. To the extent that a conversational space for such considerations has been created, we believe the field will benefit. To the extent that these conversations are used to draw rigid boundaries between appropriate and inappropriate research subject matter, we believe the field will be diminished.
Given that IT phenomena are increasingly pervasive and invasive in our everyday lives, and that they continue to exhibit unprecedented capabilities and consequences, we continue to argue that only a diversity of perspectives, methods and theories will help us make adequate sense of the development, use and implications of information technology in society. Thus, we continue to hope our paper will encourage scholars, working from multiple different points of view, to become interested in questioning the specific status, nature and influence of information technology in their studies. Or at least, to ask the question, does it make a difference that information technology is part of the story here? And if so, what is that difference, and how is it manifested materially, economically, culturally, historically and organizationally?
We further believe that a deeper engagement with information technology is important for the future of the field of IS. Engaging the artifact can enliven and enlarge the field while simultaneously stabilizing and sustaining what is—unavoidably, given the nature of information technologies—a dynamic and emergent identity. The field of IS has a particular vantage point and advantage in being able to conceptualize the IT artifact from multiple disciplinary lenses. Other fields are also beginning to focus on the intensifying socioeconomic implications of emergent information technologies. Computer science, for example, is taking some of its more social and organizational subfields, like CSCW and social informatics, more seriously than ever before. Increasingly, there are new schools of
References 291
informatics that combine computer and information science with various domain sciences to engage in what some have dubbed e-science. The technologies of interest include supercomputers, middleware, grid computing, semantic webs, ontologies, visualization tools, knowledge environments for big science, and cyberinfrastructure. We hope that the field of IS will take these innovative enterprises and their technologies seriously as new domains of inquiry, rather than leaving them to researchers in other fields. Interest in the critical phenomenal event of emerging information technologies positions the IS research community to contribute significant knowledge in these new domains. We hope that the field of IS will be open to exploring and engaging these new challenges and opportunities.
REFERENCES
Akrich, M. (1992) ‘The de-scription of technical artifacts’, in W. E. Bijker and J. Law (eds), Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 205–24.
Berg, M. (1997) ‘Of forms, containers, and the electronic medical record: some tools for a sociology of the formal’, Science, Technology and Human Values, 22(4), pp. 403–33.
Bowker, G. C. and Star, S. L. (1999) Sorting Things Out: Classification and its Consequences, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Callon, M. (1987) ‘Society in the making: the study of technology as a tool for sociological analysis’, in W. E. Bijker, T. P. Hughes and T. Pinch (eds.),
The Social Construction of Technological Systems, MIT Press: Cambridge, MA, pp. 83–103.
Friedman, B. (ed.) (1997) Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
King, J. L. (1993) ‘Editorial notes’, Information Systems Research, 4(4), December, pp. 291–8.
Kling, R. and Dutton, W. H. (1982) ‘The computing package: dynamic complexity’, in J. N. Danziger, W. H. Dutton, R. Kling and K. L. Kraemer (eds), Computers and Politics: High Technology in Local Government, Columbia University Press, New York, pp. 136–69.
Kling, R., McKim, G. and King, A. (2003) ‘A bit more to it: Scholarly communication forums as socio-technical interaction networks’, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 51(14), pp. 1306–20.
Kling, R. and Scacchi, W. (1982) ‘The web of computing: computing technology as social organization’, Advances in Computers, 21, Academic Press, New York.
Latour, B. (1987) Science in Action. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA. Lessig, L. (1999) Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, Basic Books, New York.
Lessig, L. (2001) The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, Random House, New York.
292 The Artifact Redux
Orlikowski, W. J. and Iacono, C. S. (2001) ‘Desperately seeking the “IT” in IT research—a call to theorizing the IT artifact’, Information Systems Research, 12(2), pp. 121–34.
Suchman, L. (1994) ‘Do categories have politics?’, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 2, pp. 177–90.
Suchman, L. (1995) ‘Making work visible’, Communications of the ACM, 38(9), pp. 56–65.
13
Like Ships Passing in the Night: The Debate on the Core of the Information Systems Discipline1
Ron Weber
On 24 March 2003, as then Editor-in-Chief of the MIS Quarterly, I accepted an Issues and Opinions submission written by Izak Benbasat and Bob Zmud entitled, ‘The Identity Crisis within the IS Discipline: Defining and Communicating the Discipline’s Core Properties.’ The paper subsequently appeared in the June 2003 issue of the MIS Quarterly (Benbasat and Zmud 2003). In this same issue of the journal, I provided my editorial statement under the title, ‘Still Desperately Seeking the IT Artifact’ (Weber 2003). The title of my editorial statement was based on the title of a well-known and frequently cited paper by Wanda Orlikowski and Suzanne Iacono published in the June 2001 issue of Information Systems Research— ‘Desperately Seeking the “IT” in IT Research—A Call to Theorizing the IT Artifact’ (Orlikowski and Iacono 2001). In their paper, Orlikowski and Iacono had expressed concerns that the information systems artifact was not a central focus in much of the research that had been conducted within the information systems discipline.
Both Benbasat and Zmud’s paper and my editorial were motivated by concerns we have about the scholarly status of the information systems discipline. The three of us contend that the information systems discipline lacks a ‘core.’ As a result, we believe the discipline lacks a distinct identity. Moreover, in the absence of a distinct identity,