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Theoretically speaking. (1).

Article Excerpt
The MIS Quarterly has always had a strong focus on building and testing theory. In this regard, most research articles published in the MIS Quarterly have proposed a theory and then tested it either in whole or in part. In the June 1998 issue of the MIS Quarterly, however, Bob Zmud as then Editor-in-Chief issued a call for pure-theory submissions: research article submissions that had the sole purpose of articulating a theory of some information systems-or information technology-related phenomena (http://www.misq.org/archivist/vol/no22/issue2/edstat.html#pure). Empirical research would not be a feature of such submissions. As a model for theory-only submissions, Bob pointed to articles published in the Academy of Management Review, a management journal devoted solely to publishing pure-theory papers. Implicit in Bob's editorial comments was the need for theory-only submissions to relate to the MIS Quarterly's mission--namely, publication of high-quality research about "both the management of information technology and the use of information technology for managerial and organizational purposes" (http://www.misq.org/).

In these editorial comments, I address the topic of theory building. My motivation is fourfold. First, as I indicated in my March 2003 editorial comments, I believe that, as members of a discipline, we still need to improve our theory-building skills. In my view, we still rely too much on theories borrowed and adapted from other disciplines--perhaps a manifestation of our need to build theories in domains where no prior theory exists. Second, much more has been written about theory testing than theory building. I hope these editorial comments might help by providing some useful pointers on how to build high-quality theory. Third, I want to reiterate Bob Zmud's call for more theory-only submissions to the MIS Quarterly. Via these editorial comments, I hope to illustrate the ways in which such submissions might be crafted and the types of contributions to knowledge that theory-only submissions might seek to make. Finally, I want to canvass briefly some controversial issues relating to theory building--for example, whether theory building is even a meaningful activity to undertake within our discipline and, if so, what forms it should take. My hope is that my comments will motivate more discussion and debate on these issues--issues that perhaps some of us would prefer to shun because of the challenges they present to our long-held beliefs about theory.

At the outset, I need to make clear that my intent is not to consider theory building purely from an objectivist, realist perspective. Rather, I hope my views will apply equally to both objectivist and subjectivist philosophies (at least some forms of these philosophies, if not all). I have to make choices about the language I use, however, and these choices might imply I have a particular, perhaps narrow view of theory building. Again, this is not my intent, and I hope the broader issues I am canvassing will still surface.

Nature of Theory

What is a theory? It is notoriously difficult to answer this question. Moreover, my experience is that any definition proposed is sure to evoke disagreement among scholars. Indeed, some even see the notion of theory as an anachronism--an idea that reflects earlier, naive notions about our abilities to understand the world (the so-called "modernist" view of the world). I will comment further on these matters below.

My own view is that a theory is an account that is intended to explain or predict some phenomena that we perceive in the world. The terms account and phenomena, however, have particular meanings. I will explain the latter first and then the former.

To understand the meaning of the term phenomena, we first need to cover some basic ontology. For me, the two fundamental (atomic) constructs we need to be able to describe anything we perceive in the world are things and properties of things. The values of the properties of some thing at a point in space-time are its state. Changes of state (changes that occur in the values of properties) are events that occur to a thing. Perhaps a counterintuitive idea, however, is that the states of and events that occur to a thing are also properties of the thing. States and events do not exist in the ether. They "belong to" some thing. Thus, they are properties of the thing.

Phenomena are the states of things or events that occur to things. When we build a theory, therefore, we are seeking to account for the state(s) of some thing (or things) or an event(s) that occurs to some thing (or things). For instance, we might wish to build a theory about a user's perceptions of the quality of data in an information system and the user's perceptions of the effectiveness of the system. Both perceptions are components of the state of a single thing--namely, the user. The theory we seek to build in essence is an attempt to articulate a law (or less formally an association or statement) that relates the value of two components of the user's state. For example, our theory might provide arguments to support the proposition that a user's perception of the quality of data in an information system is high when the user's perception of the effectiveness of the information system is high (however we might define high). We might have articulated this theory at the outset of our research on the basis of prior research and our own knowledge and experience. Alternatively, we might have articulated it only in light of insights we have obtained after a long period of intensive data gathering in the field. Whatever the scenario,...

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