WHAT IS INFORMATION SUCH THAT THERE CAN BE INFORMATION SYSTEMS?

Information systems, as a discipline, is concerned with the generation, storage and transmission of information, generally by technological means. As such, it would seem to be fundamental that it has a clear and agreed conceptualization of its core subject matter – namely “information”. Yet, we would claim, this is clearly not the case. As McKinney and Yoos point out, in a recent survey of the term information within information systems: “This is the IS predicament – using information as a ubiquitous label whose meaning is almost never specified. Virtually all the extant IS literature fails to explicitly specify meaning for the very label that identifies it.” We live in an information age and the vast majority of information (whatever it may be) is made available through a wide range of computer systems and one would expect therefore that information systems would in fact be one of the leading disciplines of the times rather than one that appears to hide itself in the shadows. Governments nowadays routinely utilize many academic experts to advise them in a whole range of areas but how many IS professors ever get asked? So, the primary purpose of this paper is to stimulate a debate within IS to discuss, and try to establish, a secure foundation for the discipline in terms of its fundamental concept – information. The structure of the paper is that we will firstly review the theories of information used (generally implicitly) within IS. Then we will widen the picture to consider the range of theories available more broadly within other disciplines. We will then suggest a particular approach that we consider most fruitful and discuss some of the major contentious issues. We will illustrate the theories with examples from IS

Management Knowledge and Knowledge Management: Realism and Forms of Truth

This paper addresses the issue of truth and knowledge in management generally and knowledge management in particular. Based on ideas from critical realism and critical theory, it argues against the monovalent conceptualization of knowledge implicitly or explicitly held by many authors and aims instead to develop a characterization that recognises the rich and varied ways in which human beings may be said “to know”. It points out and conceptualises a fundamental dimension of knowledge that is generally ignored or cursorily treated within the literature, that is, “truth”. It identifies four forms of knowledge – propositional, experiential, performative and epistemological – and explores their characteristics, especially in terms of truth and validity. It points out some implications for knowledge management

Throwing Out the Baby with the Bathwater: The Undesirable Effects of National Research Assessment Exercises on Research

The evaluation of the quality of research at a national level has become increasingly common. The UK has been at the forefront of this trend having undertaken many assessments since 1986, the latest being the “Research Excellence Framework” in 2014. The argument of this paper is that, whatever the intended results in terms of evaluating and improving research, there have been many, presumably unintended, results that are highly undesirable for research and the university community more generally. We situate our analysis using Bourdieu’s theory of cultural reproduction and then focus on the peculiarities of the 2008 RAE and the 2014 REF the rules of which allowed for, and indeed encouraged, significant game-playing on the part of striving universities. We conclude with practical recommendations to maintain the general intention of research assessment without the undesirable side-effects

A Review of Theory and Practice in Scientometrics

Scientometrics is the study of the quantitative aspects of the process of science as a communication system. It is centrally, but not only, concerned with the analysis of citations in the academic literature. In recent years it has come to play a major role in the measurement and evaluation of research performance. In this review we consider: the historical development of scientometrics, sources of citation data, citation metrics and the “laws" of scientometrics, normalisation, journal impact factors and other journal metrics, visualising and mapping science, evaluation and policy, and future developments

Identifying Research Fields within Business and Management: A Journal Cross-Citation Analysis

A discipline such as business and management (B&M) is very broad and has many fields within it, ranging from fairly scientific ones such as management science or economics to softer ones such as information systems. There are at least three reasons why it is important to identify these sub-fields accurately. Firstly, to give insight into the structure of the subject area and identify perhaps unrecognised commonalities; second for the purpose of normalizing citation data as it is well known that citation rates vary significantly between different disciplines. And thirdly, because journal rankings and lists tend to split their classifications into different subjects – for example, the Association of Business Schools (ABS) list, which is a standard in the UK, has 22 different fields. Unfortunately, at the moment these are created in an ad hoc manner with no underlying rigour. The purpose of this paper is to identify possible sub-fields in B&M rigorously based on actual citation patterns. We have examined 450 journals in B&M which are included in the ISI Web of Science (WoS) and analysed the cross-citation rates between them enabling us to generate sets of coherent and consistent sub-fields that minimise the extent to which journals appear in several categories. Implications and limitations of the analysis are discussed

The Long and Winding Road: Getting Papers Published in Top Journals

This paper goes behind the scenes, from the author\u27s point of view, in the messy process of publishing papers in top quality journals. It describes the tortuous history of a particular paper that was eventually published in Information Systems Research to provide some insight, especially for those new to the academic world. It goes on to draw more general guidelines for shaping papers for publication

A Critique of Statistical Modelling from a Critical Realist Perspective

Most published research in information systems is underpinned by a positivist or empiricist philosophy. This generally involves the collection of quantitative data and its subsequent analysis using some form of statistical modelling, often multivariate such as regression. Alternative paradigms, such as interpretivism, often critique such statistical analysis on the grounds that the social world is inherently different to the material world. However, this often leads to a strongly anti-realist position which denies the existence of any forms of external social structures. The purpose of this paper is also to put forward a critique of traditional statistical modelling and analysis but from a different direction - critical realism. This maintains the ontological reality of social systems whilst recognising the cultural and historical epistemological limits to our knowledge of them