The information systems (IS) research community continues to raise questions about the characteristics and role of theory in IS. Some suggest the preeminence and misplaced emphasis on theory distorts and limits IS research, while others suggest the manner in which theory is borrowed and adapted impedes creative and innovative theorizing. This essay describes an established mode of theorizing th...

An ambiguous terminology as well as a lack of clarity prevail in information systems research when focusing on enterprise architecture (EA) and its corresponding management function. Sound definitions for key terms in the field of EA design, i.e. strategies, principles, and goals, are too often used interchangeably with slightly different meaning. Addressing this situation, the present article ...

Information & Management (I&M) has been consistently regarded as one of the top academic journals in information systems (IS). In a spirit of introspection, this article profiles research published in I&M: we identified the most productive authors and universities associated with most research publications in I&M during the past 13 years (1992–2005). Based on a more detailed analysis of publica...

Critical Realism (CR) has recently emerged as a philosophical and methodological alternative for conducting information systems research. In order to fully leverage CR, researchers must have a clear conceptual and empirical understanding of causal mechanisms and their relationship to the organizational, social, and technological structures existing in a given research setting. Unfortunately, th...

The linguistic turn within philosophy has recently gained increased attention within social sciences. It can be seen as an attempt to investigate traditional philosophical problems by analysing the linguistic expressions used for these investigations. More generally, the phenomenon of language itself must be considered because of its (constitutional) impact on the investigation of phenomena in ...

The topic of collaboration in cross-organizational and cross-border settings is an emerging subfield of information systems research. This paper presents a compressive literature review of 52 research papers, published from 2000 to 2007, in four leading journals. The focus of the analysis are topics of investigation, sources of data, and the underlying theories. The results indicate that most o...

The address explores three questions that are important for operational research: ‘Where do we come from?’, ‘What are we?’ and ‘Where are we going?’ First, it looks briefly at the history of O.R. from Babbage to Blackett and the importance of a ‘union of theory and practice’ in our work. Then it looks at O.R.’s identity and image and argues that we do have a reasonably clear idea of our identit...

In complex human-machine systems, successful operations depend on an elaborate set of procedures which are specified by the operational management of the organization. These procedures indicate to the human operator (in this case the pilot) the manner in which operational management intends to have various tasks done. The intent is to provide guidance to the pilots and to ensure a safe, logic...

This study provides a current assessment of the impact of various Information Systems (IS) articles, and the productivity of IS researchers and institutions. Using a data set of Information Systems articles that spans 15 years, we conducted a scientometric study of the field. The articles are drawn from three premier IS journals. We use citation analysis to demonstrate the impact of articles on...

Despite strong interest in Csikszentmihalyi’s flow theory to understand user behavior in information systems, existing literature shows significant inconsistencies on the conceptualization, conditions, and effect mechanisms of the flow construct. Reviewing extant literature in IS on the concept of flow, this paper discusses the most common theoretical and methodological shortcomings, drawing on...