Article

THE IDENTITY CRISIS WITHIN THE IS DISCIPLINE: DEFINING AND

COMMUNICATING THE DISCIPLINE’S CORE PROPERTIES
IS research community is making the discipline’s central identity ambiguous by, all too
frequently, under-investigating phenomena intimately associated with IT-based systems and
over-investigating phenomena distantly associated with IT-based systems.

IS discipline, within an organizational field populated by other scholarly disciplines or

populations. Aldrich argues

“Together, founders and members of new organizations create communities of practice,

molded by forces that heighten the salience of organizational boundaries. Boundaries become
more salient as the contrast between organizational activities and surrounding environments
deepen.…Only when bounded entities emerge can selection pressures change the
organizational composition of populations”. (p. 161)

Organizational environments are composed of forces or institutions surrounding an

organization that affect performance, operations, and resources. It includes all of the elements
that exist outside of the organization's boundaries and have the potential to affect a portion or
all of the organization. Examples include government regulatory agencies, competitors,
customers, suppliers, and pressure from the public.And Aldrich that’s why explain the
community level is the functionally integrated system of interactingpopulations.
The population level is the set of organizations engaged in similar activities.
The organization level focuses on the individual organizations (some research further
divides organizations into individual member and sub-unit levels).

Aldrich argues that two types of legitimacy exist: cognitive legitimacy and sociopolitical
legitimacy. He defines each as follows (p. 230):

• “Cognitive legitimacy refers to the acceptance of a new kind of venture as a taken for granted
feature of the environment.”

• “Sociopolitical legitimacy refers to the acceptance by key stakeholders, the general public,
key opinion leaders, and government officials of a new venture as appropriate and right. It has
two components: moral acceptance, referring to conformity with cultural norms and values,
and regulatory acceptance, referring to conformity with government rules and regulations.”
 We believe that the IS discipline has made significance progress regarding sociopolitical
legitimacy, as seen via the institutionalization of IT as an integral part of today’s organizational
and economic contexts.

Elements from this nomological net are seemingly absent from much IS scholarship (Orlikowski
and Iacono 2001). Such an observation is not unique, having also been raised, for example,

by Massey et al. (2001):

Although IS researchers have rightly concluded that the meaning of technology is socially
constructed…our discipline’s unique contribution to the broader field of social science requires
that we understand technology as well as the organizational and individual issues surrounding
its use. If the IS community chooses a future that moves us away from a rigorous understanding
of technology itself, then we are choosing wrong. (p. 27)

Analysis: This article attempts to interpret the progress, direction, and purpose of current
research on the effects of technology on work and organizations. After a review of key
breakthroughs in the evolution of technology, we consider the disruptive effects of emerging
information and communication technologies. We then examine numbers and types of jobs
affected by developments in technology, and how this will lead to significant worker
dislocation. To illustrate technology's impact on work, work systems, and organizations, we
present four popular technologies: electronic monitoring systems, robots, teleconferencing,
and wearable computing devices. To provide insights regarding what we know about the effects
of technology for OP/OB scholars, we consider the results of research conducted from four
different perspectives on the role of technology in management. We also examine how that
role is changing in the emerging world of technology. We conclude by considering approaches
to six human resources (HR) areas supported by traditional and emerging technologies,
identifying related research questions that should have profound implications both for research
and for practice, and providing guidance for future research and the predictor variables are
expected to influence the outcome variable as follows:

• The greater the mutual understanding among project team members, the greater the client
satisfaction.

• The greater the interdependency of tasks assigned project team members, the greater their
mutual understanding.

• The greater the task interdependency, under a low goal clarity condition, the greater the
client satisfaction.
IT could provide a customer with a virtual product experience, i.e., an experience enabling the
customer to better appreciate the product’s qualities when the product is being purchased
through an online channel and, hence, cannot be experienced directly (Jiang and Benbasat
2002). Functional control, supported by software such as SHOCKWAVE, allows a customer to
explore a product’s functionality via mouse and keyboard. Perceived diagnosticity, the
dependent variable, is defined as the extent to which the consumer believes the shopping
experience is helpful in evaluating the product (Kempf and Smith 1998). IT artifacts and IS
systems to increase their compatibility, usefulness, and ease of use or on how to best manage
and support IT or IT-enabled business initiatives. Interestingly, this is what we used to do in
experimental studies in the 1970s and 1980s, e.g., the studies on decision support systems
(DSS). It is possible that the current emphasis with theories from other disciplines has
distracted the IS research community from developing its own theories.

Analysis:The decision-making literature has consistently acknowledged the important role of

diagnosticity on decision outcomes (e.g., decision confidence, satisfaction, transaction
intention; Fang, 2012;Kempf & Smith, 1998). Perceived diagnosticity has been found to ease
information asymmetry through the logic of incentives and signals ( Pavlou et al., 2006) and
reinforce consumers' confidence in their purchase decisions (Kempf & Smith, 1998). In essence,
a higher perception of diagnosticity is believed to buttress one's belief in one's decision (Jiang &
Benbasat, 2004).

IS scholars research and teach a set of diverse topics associated with information technologies,
IT infrastructures and IT-enabled business solutions (i.e., information systems), and the
immediate antecedents and consequences of these information systems (e.g., managing,
planning, designing, building, modifying, implementing, supporting, and/or assessing IT-based
systems that serve, directly or indirectly, practical purposes). The focus of this commentary is
not about whether such a diversity of topics is beneficial for the IS field (Benbasat and Weber
1996; Robey 1996).

Analysis: According to the Benbasat and weber three types of diversity have been prominent in
the Information Systems discipline for over a decade: (a) diversity in the problems addressed.
(b) diversity in the theoretical foundations and reference disciplines used to account for IS
phenomena; and (c) diversity in the methods used to collect, analyze, and interpret data.
History has played a major part in encouraging IS researchers to use diversity as a means of
countering criticisms of their discipline and increasing their research rigor and productivity. In
particular, frequent recourse to reference disciplines has underpinned much of the research
that has been undertaken since the early 1980s. There are now signs, however, that the level of
diversity that currently exists in IS research may be problematic. In this paper, we consider
some of the benefits and costs of allowing diversity to reign in the IS discipline. We also
propose a structure that we hope will facilitate discourse on the benefits and costs of diversity
and on the role that diversity should now play in the IS discipline.

It is arguable that information systems probably is not even a field, but rather an intellectual
convocation that arose from the confluence of interests among individuals from many fields
who continue to pledge allegiance to those fields through useful ties of various kinds.These
fields are a source of intellectual capital in the form of good ideas, methods, folkways and
mores that are necessary for any decent research community.Leading publications contain
many articles from computer science, applied mathematics, economics, organizational studies,
psychology, and so on. (King 1993, p. 293)

Analysis: Benbasat and Weber's (1996) historical perspective on IS research shows how our
current institutional arrangements are closely linked to those of the past. For example, doctoral
training in IS is usually organized to provide exposure to one or more "reference disciplines," a
term popularized by Keen's (1980) infiuential address to the first annual Conference on
Information Systems (now ICIS). Many senior faculty in IS received their own doctoral training in
one of these disciplines because IS doctoral programs did not exist at the time of their studies.
As a result, multiple reference disciplines continue to contribute heavily to the intellectual
development of IS. Journal of Organizational Computing is primarily focused on economic
analyses and analytic methods in investigating technologies that support organizational
structures and processes. Accounting, Management and Information Technologies is another
new journal with a distinct orientation toward interpretive work in information systems. Even
the frequently-lamented domination of the positivist paradigm seems to have weakened, due
in part to the influence of European research traditions on IS (Benbasat and Weber 1996). Thus,
in their earlier assessment of articles in mainstream IS journals, Orlikowski and Baroudi (1991)
concluded that IS was dominated by positivist research and that interpretive studies and critical
theory were underrepresented.