IS Information Systems a (Social) Science?

McBride (2018) worries that researchers increasingly approach information systems (IS) research like a natural science whereby they seek to develop general laws “by applying statistical surveys and running laboratory experiments”. While it is interesting to liken IS to the hard sciences, the discipl...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inCommunications of the Association for Information Systems Vol. 43; pp. 189 - 196
Main Authors Thatcher, Jason, Pu, Wenxi, Pienta, Daniel
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Atlanta Association for Information Systems 01.01.2018
Subjects
Entrepreneurship
Epistemology
Information systems
Information technology
Statistical methods
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:McBride (2018) worries that researchers increasingly approach information systems (IS) research like a natural science whereby they seek to develop general laws “by applying statistical surveys and running laboratory experiments”. While it is interesting to liken IS to the hard sciences, the discipline has deep interdisciplinary roots that join many ontological, epistemological, and even philosophical understandings of phenomena related to information technology (IT). These diverse viewpoints strengthen the discipline. They are healthy and beneficial for a discipline that studies rapidly moving, complex phenomena. Rather than turn away from rigorous, statistically intensive methods, we propose that IS researchers embrace diversity and adopt an entrepreneurial model of scholarship. By employing entrepreneurial mindsets to guide their selection of theories and methods, we believe IS scholars can create opportunities to conduct rigorous, relevant work that examines increasingly diverse, complex, and emerging IT-related phenomena.
ISSN:1529-3181
1529-3181
DOI:10.17705/1CAIS.04311