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...exception this view, attributing the anxiety to the field's relative youth, its focus on technology in a technophobic institutional environment, and academic ethnocentrism within and without the field. While developing stronger theory might be helpful, it is more important that the IS field pushes back against the hegemony of IS critics outside the field whose arguments masquerade as concerns about academic quality. The anxiety discourse should be replaced by the IS field's aggressive pursuit of new instructional and research opportunities that cross traditional institutional barriers and the pursuit of excellence on academic criteria deemed important by the field itself.
Keywords: Information Systems, identity, legitimacy, theoretic core, discipline, disciplinary, academic politics
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Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for? The Faultless Painter, Robert Browning (1812-1889)
Introduction
The 16th century produced two great portrait artists. One was Leonardo da Vinci, whose enigmatic paintings remain an inspiration four centuries later. The other was Andrea del Sarto, the "faultless painter," whose quest for technical perfection caused him to lose touch with the deep inspiration of his art. Browning's poem about del Sarto concludes that greatness comes not from holding tight to what we can grasp, but rather from our willingness to reach beyond what we can grasp. There is a lesson in his poem for the Information Systems field as we grapple with the field's future.
The IS field's "anxiety discourse" has been evident at least since 1972, when Harvard Business Review published John Dearden's "MIS is a Mirage"--a paper that questioned the fundamental ideas behind the field. In the years that followed, Dearden's theme was repeated in various forms. At the first International Conference on Information Systems, Keen (1980) cast the field in reference to other disciplines. The same year, Kling (1980) characterized the field as an arena yearning to be a discipline. In 1985, Mumford and her colleagues raised the specter of IS as a doubtful science characterized by "poor intellectual and methodical rooting." A popular panel at the 1986 ICIS entitled "Back to the Future: Will There Be an ICIS in 1996?" opened with the concern that IS was "like the dinosaurs ... heading blindly toward extinction" (Culnan and Huff 1986). Banville and Landry (1989) found that the field had yet to "be disciplined."
The anxiety was evident even during the halcyon peak of the dot.com era. Benbasat and Weber (1996) warned of a "miasma that spells the demise of the discipline." Stowell and Mingers (1997) asked once again, "is information systems a distinctive discipline?" Straub (1999) answered that IS is "a polyglot discipline that lacks focus, centrality, and theory," doomed to absorption by other disciplines with greater "intellectual clarity and substance." Finally, in May 2003, the Harvard Business Review reached back three decades and updated Dearden's aphorism by publishing Nicholas Carr's paper, "IT Doesn't Matter."
It is difficult to imagine how a field that started as a "mirage" and doesn't really matter could be free from anxiety. Nevertheless, decades later, the IS field still rolls along. How can something so seemingly problematic survive? Our starting point for considering the state of the IS field is to invoke Samuel Johnson's comment about a dog walking on its hind legs--the surprise is not that the dog does it poorly, but that it does it at all.
This essay challenges the anxiety discourse and suggests an explanation for its persistence. We are not and have never been anxious about the IS field, but we know many good colleagues who are. By deconstructing the anxiety discourse, we felt we might be convinced to become anxious. Happily, the results of our efforts reaffirm our initial position, and we continue to believe the IS field has a great future. We do not expect this essay to put an end to the anxiety discourse, but we do suggest an alternative view of that anxiety that may be more productive in formulating the field's strategy. In particular, we hope to show that a fixation on the issues raised by the anxiety discourse imposes serious opportunity costs on the field that it cannot afford.
We develop our analysis in three steps. First, we deconstruct the anxiety discourse, especially with respect to concerns about academic identity and legitimacy. Second, we identify the mechanisms that induce hegemony of other fields acting against the IS field and the tendency of those within the IS field to turn against each other in response to this external oppression. Finally, we recommend a set of actions for defeating the political oppression of the IS field where it exists, expanding the field's promising instructional and research opportunities that cross traditional institutional barriers, and pursuing a commitment to excellence based on academic criteria chosen by the IS field itself.
The Logic Behind the Anxiety Discourse
The foremost concern in the anxiety discourse is the perceived inadequacy of the IS field as an academic enterprise. This inadequacy is typically articulated either in referent terms (respected academics outside the field do not respect the field) or in absolute terms (the IS field does not measure up to some objective standard that other, better fields meet). Fully elaborated, the discourse typically evolves as follows: the IS field is academically weak and its only path to legitimacy is to make it academically stronger by cementing it around a theoretical core.
This argument invokes a set of warrants: assumptions or beliefs that justify the movement from premises to conclusions (Toulmin 1958). Warrants establish the connection between a writer's claims and the theoretical or empirical support used to back those claims. They often emerge from cultural experiences or personal observations and can be conspicuous or inconspicuous. They are frequently taken for granted by both the writer and the reader. Warrants often include enthymemes, which are categorical syllogisms with one unstated premise that can be reconstructed using the principles of categorical syllogism. The warrants of the anxiety-discourse argument can be stated as follows:
(1) The IS field struggles because it lacks legitimacy.
(2) The IS field lacks legitimacy because it lacks a clear identity.
(3) The IS field lacks a clear identity because it lacks a strong theoretic core.
By extension, the IS field will acquire identity and legitimacy in good time if and only if it develops a strong theoretic core.
We find this argument unconvincing on a number of dimensions, which we discuss elsewhere. (2) A strong theoretic core might help create both legitimacy and identity in any field, but having such a core is neither necessary nor sufficient to engender identity or legitimacy. Moreover, the anxiety discourse confuses identity and legitimacy, often using the two terms interchangeably or wrongly implying that legitimacy is a precursor to identity. We must untangle these terms if we are to make progress with the objectives of our essay.
From the Latin idem, meaning "the same," identity is an impression created by a set of characteristics that make a thing recognizable or known. The essential attribute of identity is consistency in character. An iconic claim of the anxiety discourse is that identity is attained only through the exclusive ownership of a powerful, general theory. This claim is refuted by abundant examples to the contrary. English, for example, is an identifiable academic...
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