Conceptualizing Workarounds: Meanings and Manifestations in Information Systems Research

We reviewed papers in core IS outlets that defined the term workaround or presented an example of a workaround. In the analysis, we used Ogden and Richard’s triangle of reference as a theoretical framework to analyze the relationship between 1) the term workaround; 2) theories, definitions, and use of the term; and 3) their empirical basis and empirical workaround behavior that the papers describe. First, we summarize the existing theoretical insights regarding workarounds and investigate their validity. Second, we show that studies have defined and used the term workaround differently to the extent that they have not always applied it to the same empirical phenomena, which raises questions about some theoretical insights’ validity. Third, we suggest a definition for workarounds that we inductively derived from empirical accounts of workaround behavior and, therefore, that adequately describes how researchers commonly use the term and makes it possible to distinguish workarounds from other similar phenomena

Who is Our Paul Erdös? An Analysis of the Information Systems Collaboration Network

This study examines the historical Information Systems research collaboration network. We build the network using co-authorship information in the Senior Scholar Basket of 8 journals from the publication of MISQ’s first issue in April 1977 to November 2015. The different journals vary widely in their network configurations. We examine the influence of gender, temporal, and geographic homophily on co-authorship in the network. Using exponential random graph modeling on a randomly selected subset of the network, preliminary evidence suggests that ties in the IS collaboration network exhibit homophily according to gender and geography. Conversely, co-authorship seems to exhibit great diversity along the temporal dimension – researchers that graduated around the same time are not more likely to collaborate than would be expected from chance. We also reveal the current center of the IS collaboration network. Based on this center, we propose a metric to measure a researcher’s connectedness within the network