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research practice, the establishment of high quality journals, the emergence of IS 'bodies
of knowledge', the development of IS literature, and the establishment of an 'excellent
scholarly communication network' (Baskerville and Myers, 2002, pp. 3-5).
It would be possible to debate some of the issues the authors raise on a point-by-point
basis. The bodies of knowledge they identify are, for instance, strongly oriented towards
applications (and hence are appropriate to an applied discipline), whereas whatever
references there are to abstract theory tend to be to speech act theory, socio-technical
concepts, social construction, and other concepts that originate in other fields (Baskerville
and Myers, 2002, p. 4). But while this is not just a minor concern, it is possible for the
purposes of this paper to accept the authors' major statements as fact, and still to question
how they should be interpreted.
One of Baskerville and Myers' key points is that papers originating in the IS field are
now being cited in other disciplines, and they focus particularly on a widely admired
paper by Markus on power and politics in the IT context (Markus, 1983). It is indisput-
able that the paper is of exceptional quality and deservedly well known. But as Bask-
erville and Myers acknowledge, it is also the case that the theories utilised in it were
imported from other disciplines (Baskerville and Myers, 2002, p. 6), and not developed
within IS. Further to this, Latour (1987) has demonstrated the existence of a snowball
effect with citations, so that the chances of more citations increase with each new refer-
ence. The fact that the Markus paper was published in 1983 therefore becomes relevant.
A different interpretation of the citation evidence is that researchers are referencing a
paper generally acknowledged to be of exemplary quality, but without concern for its
disciplinary origins. What the evidence does not show is whether researchers in other
disciplines are in fact staying alert for opportunities to cite new developments in IS
theory and practice; as Baskerville and Myers concede, 'it is … possible that some of
these disciplines are themselves too inwardly focused and the “not invented here”
syndrome will prevail' (Baskerville and Myers, 2002, p. 9).
While it is clear that the IS field has generated some extremely high-quality work and
publications, this does not automatically translate into significant intellectual or academic
influence. Avgerou notes that 'from the conventional academic perspective, IS has serious
limitations … it lacks the distinctiveness of theory and method that is usually associated
with scientific disciplines … [and] does not have a clear location on the map of academic
disciplines' (Avgerou, 2000, p. 576). Although IS researchers continue to mine reference
disciplines for useful concepts, there seems to be no evidence that IS ideas are being
adopted in the same way within other disciplines. To take a specific example, Baskerville
and Myers discuss business re-engineering as an area of attention in IS, yet while it is
surely correct to say that IS researchers have 'studied [re-engineering] quite extensively'
(Baskerville and Myers, 2002, p. 6), the idea originated as an organisational theory, and
embeds no discernible theory of IS (Hammer and Champy, 1993).
To put the case in this way is not to dismiss the idea that IS could, and perhaps already
should, be seen as a reference discipline. And, as the authors point out, there is surely
no convincing reason to think that other disciplines are 'more foundational' than IS
(Baskerville and Myers, 2002, p. 2). Nevertheless, in the absence of references to broad
theories originating in the IS field, the widespread citation of some IS papers seems to
imply a recognition of credible research rather than any acknowledgement of IS as an
independently significant academic discipline. Overall, there seems little direct evidence
to challenge the view that IS, to the extent it is understood and acknowledged as an in-
dependent field at all, is generally seen as an applied discipline primarily concerned
with finding solutions to technical problems.
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