An Empirical Assessment of Researcher Perspectives

The notion of researcher perspective refers to the viewpoint from which the object of study is observed. It appears to have to date attracted very little attention in the IS and cognate literatures. On the basis of preliminary studies undertaken in relation to a range of IS publishing venues, the author\u27s contention is that the vast majority of IS research adopts the perspective of the system sponsor, with very little adopting the perspectives of users, usees or the environment, and very little of it reflecting the reality that stakeholders in information systems have distinct and often conflicting interests. A review was undertaken of the perspectives adopted by researchers in papers presented at the Bled eConference. On the basis of a 20% sample, Bled papers were found to have been very strongly oriented to the interests of system sponsors. Although a larger proportion of papers at recent events have been on the social dimension, most studies of social media are motivated by the desire of corporations to exploit social media users. Few researchers rise to the considerable but important challenges of dual-perspective and multi-perspective studies. The quality of IS research can be much-improved if researchers give more careful consideration to the perspective(s) that they adopt in their work

Generating Procedural Controls to Facilitate Trade: The Role of Control in the Absence of Trust

Over the years, Trust has been recognized in the Bled community as a key enabling factor to stimulate Electronic Commerce. Authors have discussed formal aspects of trust, the role trust plays in the adoption of both B2B and B2C Electronic Commerce, as well as mechanisms to build trust and/or overcome the lack of it. This article first provides a brief overview of the Trust-related articles in the Bled eConference. It then focuses on one specific aspect of the facilitation of trade in absence of trust: the development of procedural controls that enable Electronic Commerce at arms’ length, summarizing the contributions of the authors on this theme at the Bled Conference since the early 1990s. The paper concludes with the authors’ current view on developing procedural controls, focusing on the design process itself, which is often a rather lengthy process consisting of trial-and -error. Here a more analytical approach is proposed to the identification of control requirements for inter-organizational procedures. The approach involves abstracting the process to identify its basic deontic elements. A model checking approach is then applied to identify needed controls