Cross-Cultural Research in MIS

i It is hard not to notice that an increasing number of cross-cultural studies in Information Systems are being published in JGIM and other similarly oriented outlets in the last few years. Such trend, albeit to a lesser extent, is also seen in other top tier mainstream publications. For instance, in February of 2003 there was a special issue on " Cultural Issues and IT Management " in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management. Earlier calls for " field maturation " seem to have been heeded, resulting in studies not only relevant but also rigorous. This is true notwithstanding the inherent difficulties in performing high quality cross-cultural research; funding, coordination and time delays are just some of the key issues that come to mind. I have been personally involved with the organization of the CCRIS meetings (" Cross-Cultural Research in IS " Annual Meeting) concurrently with ICIS for the last 10 years. This involvement was the genesis of the idea for this issue: a selection of some of the best papers presented there during the last few years. In addition to the original review process to include papers in the CCRIS meeting, several of the papers underwent a rigorous review process with multiple revision cycles. The final result reflects the subset of papers presented here. It has been long in coming, but I believe the reader will enjoy the outcome. There are four papers in this issue. In this set of papers, cross-cultural research has been interpreted in an unusually wide perspective ; not only across " national " cultures but also across narrower definitions of culture. This viewpoint is becoming more accepted. Straub et al. (2002), for instance, argue that an individual is actually influenced by different cultures: ethnic, professional, organizational, etc. Martinsons and Davison (2003) suggest that these alternative perspectives may be instrumental in the development of much needed theory building in this area, without decreasing the rigor in the studies (Karahanna, Evaristo, & Srite, 2002). As a set, the papers in this issue recognize that different " flavors " of culture differentiation are likely to create a range of difficulties for information management. The challenge consists in not only understanding the problems and their roots, but learning how to take advantage of the potential synergies resulting from cultural pluralism (e.g., Rose, Evaristo and Straub, 2003). In the first paper, Pauleen examines the negotiation of historical claims between the …