Crisis in the IS Field? A Critical Reflection on the State of the Discipline

By Heinz K. Klein, R. Hirschheim. Journal of the AIS, 2003

422 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper explores the issue of whether the field of IS is in crisis. To do so, the paper first starts by looking back on where the field has come from. Next, it assesses the status of the IS field by exploring where the field is now. That our current status remains a ‘fragmented adhocracy’ suggests the field may indeed be in crisis or headed for a crisis. This is compounded by the fact that there are two different views on the state of the IS field, each posing its own set of threats. One is the external view of the community (the view of IS from outside the academic field); the other is the internal view (the view from inside the IS community). By analyzing these two views, a better understanding of the problems the field faces emerges. In the next part of the paper, some thoughts are presented on where might the field go from here for overcoming its internal communication deficit. The paper proposes four different types of knowledge for structuring an IS Body of Knowledge (BoK) and following on from that, the value of creating a common BoK for the field. Lastly, the implications arising from the paper’s analysis are explored. More specifically, the paper considers various options that are available for overcoming the internal communications deficit the IS field faces. These include changing the way the field thinks about generalizations, changing the institutional publication practices, focusing more on understanding the field’s organizational stakeholders, and developing new knowledge creation and transformation networks. If IS as a field can overcome its internal communications deficits, it might ultimately contribute to the societal challenge of developing a deliberative cyber democracy and thereby help to address the social communication deficit which is a feature of modern mass societies.

Subfields: Management Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f7979a3ef9bffecbff02ab79490d6e2436f83aa8

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Citations in the corpus

The information systems identity crisis (2005, methodology): “Hirschheim and Klein (2003) have also raised this point.”
The Anatomy of a Design Theory (2007, neutral): “Further development of these ideas can be found in Iivari, Hirschheim and Klein (1998), Jarvinen (2001), and Kasanen et al. (1993).”
Nothing At The Center?: Academic Legitimacy in the Information Systems Field (2004, background): “This idea is also in line with generating a general body of knowledge (BoK) that helps address concerns about the use of IT in human enterprise (Klein and Hirschheim, 2003).”
Eight key issues for the decision support systems discipline (2008, background): “Hirschheim and Klein [40], in a critical assessment of the IS discipline, identified major disconnects between IS researchers and executives, and between IS researchers and IS practitioners.”
A paradigmatic and methodological examination of information systems research from 1991 to 2001 (2004, background): “Hirschheim & Klein (2003) took this viewpoint one step further to explain why the fragmented adhocracy occurred and how the IS community could possibly build a body of knowledge which might help establish the identity of IS as a discipline.”
Defining information systems as work systems: implications for the IS field (2008, positive): “The definition of IS helps in understanding the competitive impacts of IT because IT investments affect productivity and other results only when those investments are incorporated into information systems and the work systems they support.”
Global Journal Prestige and Supporting Disciplines: A Scientometric Study of Information Systems Journals (2004, background): “Many argue that the Information Systems (IS) field(1) is in crisis and at a critical juncture in its evolving identity (Hirschheim and Klein, 2003; Markus, 1999).”
A Paradigmatic Analysis of Information Systems As a Design Science (2007, background): “It has diversity of reference disciplines from which it has adopted a number of theories (Benbasat and Weber, 1996; Hirschheim and Klein, 2003), but these theories”