Re-examining the Status of "IT" in IT Research - An Update on Orlikowski and Iacono (2001)

Nearly 10 years ago, Orlikowski and Iacono examined the conceptualization of Information Technology in Information Systems Research (ISR) articles published in 1990s, and found that the majority of these articles were not thoroughly engaged with IT artifact. They proposed that IS researchers should start to theorize about the IT artifact and employ rich conceptualizations of IT. In order to assess the field’s response to Orlikowski and Iacono’s recommendations, and obtain an up-to-date image of the contemporary IS research, we carried out a similar analysis on a recent set of articles, i.e. the full set of papers published in the last three years of ISR, Management Information Systems Quarterly (MISQ), and Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS). Our results reveal no drastic progress in terms of deeper engagement with IT artifact; 30% of the articles in our set are virtually mute about the artifact, and only 10% are employing an ensemble view of IT. Nevertheless, there are informative discrepancies between patterns in our results and those in the original study, and noticeable differences among the three journals. Implications of these findings for future research will be discussed.