The structure of the IS discipline reconsidered: Implications and reflections from a community of practice perspective

Information and Organization 18 (2008) 280–302

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The structure of the IS discipline reconsidered: Implications and reflections from a community of practice perspective Heinz K. Klein a, Rudy Hirschheim b,* a b

School of Management, SUNY Binghamton, United States E.J. Ourso College of Business, Louisiana State University, United States

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history: Received 2 September 2007 Received in revised form 20 May 2008 Accepted 22 May 2008

a b s t r a c t The motivation of this paper is to advance the recent discussion about the identity of the Information Systems field with a social analysis of its community structures. It seeks to shed new light on the reasons why the field continues to debate its identity and to voice concerns about its recognition by other disciplines. For that purpose the paper adapts selected concepts from the community of practice literature for improving our understanding of the ways in which the IS research community differentiates itself into diverse constituencies, called communities of practice and knowing (CoP&K), and how these interact in the field’s complex processes of knowledge creation and dissemination. Our second purpose is to derive some tentative, actionable recommendations for the field from applying the concepts presented in the first part of the paper. The recommendations expand three fundamental ideas: (i) why a continuously updated history of the field could be an important contribution to support boundary spanning and identity formation; (ii) what the nature and role of fundamental criticism is for the IS research community and why it is necessary for the field’s future to pay more institutional attention to it; and (iii) how to improve understanding and communication within each paradigm constituency across a broad subset of different CoP&K through building a shared sense of collective historical accomplishments. The conclusions summarize the principal results which follow from our examination of the field’s community structures and insist that the CoP&K perspective concomitantly helps to better appreciate the underlying conditions from where the current IS disciplinary challenges have arisen; it also helps to suggest

* Corresponding author. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (H.K. Klein), [email protected] (R. Hirschheim). 1471-7727/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.infoandorg.2008.05.001

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new priorities and possible strategies for dealing with these challenges. Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction Discussions about the identity of the Information Systems field1 and more specifically what should or should not be the essence or ‘core’ of the discipline can be traced back to at least the first ICIS in 1980 if not earlier. The last several years have seen an abundance of publications on the topic in journals such as MISQ, JAIS and CAIS. King and Lyytinen (2006) have attempted to capture the current state of the debate in their book Information Systems: The State of the Field. Recently, JAIS has published several commentaries about whether there is or is not an IS core (Lyytinen & King 2006; Mason 2006; Weber 2006). Such discussions are important because they can help promote a recognized identity of IS as an academic discipline. They also help to shape the research agenda of the field. Without a recognized identity some have argued, it is hard to see how the field would develop a cumulative tradition and by extension, how the field would move forward (cf. Banville & Landry 1989; Galliers 2003; Keen 1980). Clearly this is – and has been – a topic of considerable interest and importance to those in the IS field. The motivation of this paper is to advance this discussion. The first purpose of this paper is to advance the discourse on IS identity with a social analysis of the field’s community structures. By structure we mean the ways in which a field becomes differentiated into diverse constituencies. This differentiation profoundly affects the communication patterns in a field as a whole and the processes of knowledge creation and dissemination. We contend that an analysis of the community structures which make up a field, such as IS, can shed light on why the field continues to debate its identity and to voice concerns about its recognition by other disciplines. In addressing our first purpose, we apply the community of practice literature as the principal theoretical basis. This helps to understand better the ways in which the IS research community differentiates itself into diverse constituencies and how these interact in the complex processes of knowledge creation and dissemination. In focusing on the structure of the IS community and its knowledge creation and dissemination practices, it is important to recognize that community structure influences two essential functions: one is knowledge creation, the other is internal and external communication. Without recognized value-adding knowledge creation there would be nothing to communicate. Without communication, knowledge creation could not be recognized because it would fail to diffuse into the community. Both are needed so that the members of a field can coalesce around a shared and visible identity. Based on the results of our social analysis of community structures our second purpose is to propose some tentative, actionable recommendations for the field. With the above in mind, our paper has two explicit goals. (1) Suggesting that the IS field is best understood as a network of interacting CoP&K. (2) Proposing specific measures, which could help not only to appreciate the importance of internal and external boundary spanning for moving the field forward, but also to better support boundary spanning. These measures will build on the following three ideas: (i) why a continuously updated history of the field could be an important contribution to support boundary spanning and identity formation; (ii) what the nature and role of fundamental criticism are for the IS research community and why it is necessary for the field’s future to pay more institutional attention to it; and (iii) how to improve understanding and communication within each paradigm constituency across a broad subset of different CoP&K. This is a challenge that the field must meet because it has now achieved the status of a multiparadigm science. With this paper we return to some of the same key issues that were at the core of our earlier analysis of the state of the discipline (Hirschheim & Klein 2003), in particular to the issue of improving internal communication and its effects on internal knowledge creation. However, the current analysis modifies and extends our 2003 analysis in important ways. First it uses a different theoretical lens, i.e. the community of practice literature. This has the effect of leading both to a more optimistic evalua1

We use the terms ‘field’ and ‘discipline’ interchangeably.

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tion of the effects of internal communication conflicts and a clearer focus on the social differentiation of the fields into more than one level, i.e. paradigm versus community of practice networks. Second, the current paper also adds two more actionable recommendations to those already proposed in 2003. In the conclusions we shall reflect briefly how the results of the current paper reach beyond those achieved in 2003. In order to meet the goals set above for this paper, the next section begins with some foundational working definitions from the CoP literature, most importantly with the definition of the basic community of practice concept and its modification proposed by Boland and Tenkasi (1995) as Communities of Practice and Knowing, or CoP&K in short. Section 2 also explores why lifeworld differentiation between multiple CoP deserves more attention than it has received so for and how these concepts help us to better understand community structure diversification in the IS discipline. The focus on community structure is important, because it affects the communication patterns in a field as a whole and through them, the processes of knowledge creation and dissemination. It can also shed light on the question why the field continues to debate concerns about its identity. Section 3 expands on the relationship between Kuhn’s notions of paradigm and research community and the basic CoP&K concept. This expansion will subsequently help us to locate the appropriate level of analysis (i.e. community structure locus) where knowledge creation in IS research should and does take place. The elaboration of this idea is consistent with the philosophy of science shift from the knowing individual subject to community-based knowledge creation and validation. Section 3 also discusses the field’s dominant paradigms and the potential for improving the academic discourse between them. Section 4 expands the discussion of paradigmatic communities partly recasting their mission by introducing the notion of fundamental criticism and its importance for the field’s identity. Based on the foundations provided in Sections 2–4, Section 5 examines the implications of multiple CoP&K for dealing with structural communication gaps in a constructive manner recognizing the need and possible approaches for boundary spanning across different CoP&K. Section 6 returns to the field’s identity debate insisting that boundary spanning in a multiple paradigm science like the IS field is but a small step to addressing the identity issue. Its main point is to suggest that the problem of building an identity for the IS discipline could be addressed more effectively by creating a shared sense of history among its members than by hoping for the emergence of a cumulative tradition. It is this sense of a shared history that is perhaps most important for the future of the field. Section 7 summarizes the four principal results that have emerged from our analysis and concludes with identifying two strategies for improving both within-paradigm and cross-paradigm communication. It also reflects on the difference in perspective and results that this paper offers in comparison to the earlier Hirschheim and Klein (2003) analysis.

2. Conceptual foundations: the communities of practice notion and IS community structure A basic assumption for the perspective developed in the following is that the social structure of the IS discipline (or in fact any academic discipline) can and should be analyzed using the perspective of the community of practice literature (Brown & Duguid 1991; Lave & Wenger 1991; Wenger 1998). DeSanctis (2003) may have been the first in suggesting this idea and we shall review and expand her ideas. A community of practice (CoP) can be thought of as an informal aggregation of individuals engaged in a common enterprise and characterized by the manner in which its members share action and interpretations (Brown & Duguid 1991; Wenger 1998). A community of practice develops a world view including norms and values, which that community embraces to the point that its members take more or less for granted in their routine interactions. It consists of the knowledge, concepts, observations, values, meanings, assumptions, beliefs, and so on that comprises a community’s shared ‘‘thought-world” (Brown & Duguid 1991; Dougherty 1992). According to Cox (2005), a community is often thought of as a ‘‘large, self conscious and externally recognized, all encompassing, tight knit, friendly, geographically situated group”. On the other hand, it may be understood – particularly in the CoP literature – as a small, not necessarily geographically collocated or harmonious group that interacts regularly to exchange knowledge and address issues of common concern (as in a business meeting). It may, or may not, be noticed by others.

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For DeSanctis, a CoP involves five criteria (adapted from DeSanctis, 2003, p. 363): (1) frequent interaction among members, (2) routines of interaction (including patterns or rhythms of knowledge exchange), (3) evolution of a core group, (4) ability to selectively absorb newcomers, and (5) porous boundary formation that distinguishes them from other communities and their surrounding context (Aldrich, 1999). The notion of ‘‘porous” boundaries is important, because it allows the introduction of the idea that different CoPs can cooperate with each other albeit not without communication difficulties. DeSanctis believed that the CoP concept aptly applies to the IS field, for which the primary resources have been its members and the knowledge, especially procedural, that they shared. In general, the development of a CoP occurs through the mutual engagement of members, negotiation of a joint enterprise, and the creation of a shared repertoire resulting in an emergent, patterned form of social interaction among the participants. This essentially captured what the IS field was, and indeed, was a virtue of the field. DeSanctis noted the emergent, voluntary nature of the IS field and that its constitution should count as a major accomplishment: ‘‘Communities of practice are extremely difficult to develop and maintain precisely because they do not control formal authority, institutional boundaries, and other mechanisms of influence. Most important, they do not manage worker incentives and rewards; their influence is indirect, if at all. Within academe, where skilled researchers have the opportunity to join in and migrate to multiple communities, developing a new community from scratch is no easy feat. The fact that academic researchers have moved to establish a thriving community of practice around IS-related questions is impressive. Success in building this or other communities of practice lies more in efforts to build social identity among participants than in developing the cognitive legitimacy afforded by outsiders” (DeSanctis 2003, p. 362). This original notion of community of practice needs to be strengthened and broadened in four ways so as to take into account the more recent institutional and theoretical developments in the literature. First, the field should no longer be looked at as a single community of practice but as a federated set of multiple (and often competing) communities. Indeed, the more recent CoP literature notes the importance of extending the CoP notion to include constellations or networks of practices (e.g. Brown & Duguid 2000, 2001; Wenger 1998). For example, Duguid (2005) proposes an extension to CoP which he terms ‘Network of Practice’ (NoP), which appears to be applicable to collectives like the IS discipline. For Duguid, a NoP constitutes the ‘‘collective of all practitioners of a common practice” and whose members do not necessarily expect to meet face-to-face as do members of a CoP. Newcomers (e.g. graduate students) learn the tools and routines of practice and enter the NoP through a CoP (e.g. graduate department), but the CoP still retains ‘‘control and coordination of the reproduction of a group and its practice” (Duguid, 2005). However, this discussion is carried on without reference to the situation in IS as an academic field although there has been some use of the CoP notion within the IS community (cf. Levina & Vaast 2005; Pan & Leidner 2003). Second, we note the similarity of the CoP notion with Kuhn’s concept of paradigm, as long as paradigm is broadly defined as a shared frame of reference with an associated stock of meanings taken for granted about some domain of interest. Just as Kuhn’s research community depends on a shared paradigm for effective communication and problem solving so, too, does a CoP require a shared frame of reference for effective interaction. Third, we note that, just like a paradigmatic academic community, a CoP tends to evolve a shared lifeworld in the sense of Schutz and Luckmann’s (1974) Structures of the Lifeworld, and Berger and Luckmann’s (1967) The Social Construction of Reality. Through interaction in this lifeworld newcomers become socialized into the prevailing terminology (i.e. jargon), definitions (stocks of meaning) and practices that the CoP is taking for granted2. To put it in Heidegger’s terms, to be a member of a CoP is a specific way of ‘‘being-in-the-world” through continuous engagements with the (physical) entities 2 Because of the cognitive function of the lifeworld, i.e. the ultimate grounding of language, meaning and values, Habermas (1987) defines the lifeworld as that which provides the stock of meanings that are generally taken for granted by the members of the community and upon which they can rely to resolve ambiguities and conflict, and thereby make agreement-based action and decisions. (pg.127).

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that make up this world. This world consists of objects and tools (‘‘ready-to-hand-entities”) and social ‘‘others” about whom we have to worry and with whom we relate to the entities of the community’s shared lifeworld. Heidegger insists that ‘‘being-with-others” is a basic condition of human existence and involves the continuing ‘‘worry and care” about them (‘‘Sorge” and ‘‘Fuersorge”). For example, in the case of IS faculty this involves junior and senior collaborators not limited to co-authors, administrators, students, reviewers, editors, etc. Fourth, from these ongoing ‘‘caring” community engagements, a common stock of meaning is built up, which is grounded on accepted practices. This takes note of Heidegger’s principal insight that it is the shared practices and interactions in a common lifeworld that provide the ultimate grounding of all knowledge and not any abstract epistemological principles a la Kant or corroborated theories a la Popper. Only what can be communicated back to the communities and becomes accepted in their ways of acting and knowing acquires the legitimacy of accepted knowledge or state of the art practices. Along with this comes an internally recognized, but partly informal record of socially perceived community achievements (for example, an archival record of respected publications and typically cited cases), which enables relatively smooth and efficient communications in day to day affairs of common interest. If we put knowledge work and knowledge creation at the core of a CoP, we might emphasize this symbolic meaning aspect by speaking of ‘‘Communities of Practice and Knowing” or CoP&K. Boland and Tenkasi (1995) presented a persuasive argument that organizations typically consist of several interacting CoP&K. In fact, this is a key point. If organizations consist of several interacting CoP&K, in spite of a having a single center of authority, the same is likely to apply to academic disciplines without a single center of authority and strong paradigmatic consensus. Consider the IS community, and in particular, the three key features associated with any academic community. These are its internal structure, its boundary with its sister disciplines (in particular computer science, software engineering, information or library science, and communication studies), and its potential relationships to other CoP&K. Examples of such relationships are the communities of professional IS practitioners and general managers who use IS in their daily routines. For the purposes of this paper it is sufficient to elaborate on the internal structure, which is characterized by paradigmatic community divisions. Indeed, the recent documentation by King and Lyytinen (2006) provides overwhelming evidence that paradigm conflict is alive and well. This is prima facie evidence that IS consists of several interacting CoP&K. The similarity of the paradigm notion, (which Orlikowski & Baroudi 1991 prefer to call a ‘research philosophy’) with the ‘‘CoP frame of reference” concept has important consequences for understanding the lifeworlds of academia. If this similarity is accepted as a temporary working hypothesis (to be refined later), then the notion of paradigm conflict leads to Banville and Landry’s (1989) adhocracy perspective of the IS fields social community structure. This in turn supports the idea that IS as a discipline may not be one but several CoP&K. Each of these subscribes to a different view of the (social) world, values, research methods, legitimacy criteria and mission for IS as a discipline. Yes, we have routines for global interaction like discipline-wide academic conferences (ICIS, AMCIS, ECIS, etc.) and shared journals; but once at a global conference, we generally head off to separate CoP&K meetings – the ones which we feel are most supporting of our current research interests. Interaction across these sub-CoP&K is infrequent. Similarly for journals; we tend to read those papers that share the paradigmatic lens and literature of our own research associates. These observations suggest a lack of collaboration across CoP&K boundaries, which is not without risks. For example, it could lead to duplication of effort and lack of mutual understanding and communication between different CoP&K. Benign indifference (or silent hostility) instead of spirited cross CoP&K debate seems to be the rule – with rare exceptions such as King and Lyytinen (2006), where papers with sharply conflicting perspectives were published together and commented on from differing perspectives. The above analysis also supports the conclusion that the professional practitioners’ CoP&K is separate from the loose intellectual federation of academic CoP&K. This is a key issue for the IS discipline and we will return to it in Section 5 where we offer a number of strategies for boundary spanning between the different communities. We believe that such boundary spanning is important because the field needs to reach out to the various stakeholders and constituencies that make up the IS discipline. In order to reflect on how the field could accomplish this, it is necessary to first obtain a clearer picture of the field’s current community structures in terms of its multiple CoP&K.

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3. Communities of practice: implications for knowledge creation and communication If one concurs that IS as a discipline is not one Community of Practice but consists of multiple, interacting CoP&K, it is important to identify which structures and shared beliefs underlie them. The existing literature so far has mostly discussed this issue in terms of the differences between paradigmatic communities. Our purpose in this section is to refine this viewpoint by integrating the results of the paradigm debate in IS with a CoP&K perspective spanning several levels. The purpose here is not to actually map the current community structures of knowledge creation and diffusion in the IS field, because this would require a detailed empirical analysis of communication patterns and publications clustering leading away from our more fundamental concerns in this article. Rather this section aims at stimulating a different mind set for thinking about the issues related to the differentiation of knowledge creation and dissemination within large paradigm communities sharing foundational ontological and epistemological assumptions as can be observed in the IS field. The same phenomenon can also be observed in other disciplines with similar characteristics, i.e. with an applied mission, uncertain and controversial theoretical foundations, unsettled value priorities in research, etc.

3.1. Knowledge differentiation within paradigm communities Here are two possible illustrations for what we mean by multiple CoP&K within one major paradigm. One example is the debate about the position of design science (March 2006) and the second, is the subcommunities in interpretivism and critical IS research. The members of the design science CoP&K claim to have found a new paradigm in that: ‘‘. . . the design science paradigm seeks to extend the boundaries of human and organizational capabilities by creating new and innovative artifacts” (Hevner, March, Park, & Ram 2004). Nevertheless, there appears to be a difference of opinion in that the members of other positivist CoP&K consider design science as merely another research specialization. Evidence of design science being part of the positivist paradigm is its proposed design evaluation method (cf. Table 2, Hevner et al. 2004, p. 86), because it is a repetition of the scientific method as has been widely practiced in positivist IS research (and elsewhere, e.g. engineering). The second example illustrates that the emergence of specialized subcommunities is by no means restricted to the positivist paradigm, which has the largest number of adherents. Although the interpretivist camp is much less populated with fewer CoP&K, which tends to reduce their communication difficulties and make divisions less visible, they nonetheless still exist. At least five major CoP&K can be observed among interpretivists. These are the adherents of: (1) language and discourse analysis especially as they relate to interpretive case studies, (2) hermeneutic field studies, (3) phenomenological studies, (4) grounded theory, and (5) some forms of action research. Cooperation and communication among these five leaves much to be desired. Along similar lines, even the relatively small paradigmatic community of critical researchers is characterized by confusion among several major theoretical perspectives. Its theoretical perspectives range from various forms of Marxism, through critical social theory (the first and second generation of the Frankfurt School), to post-structuralism and postmodernism. Numerous references could be quoted to support this claim (cf. Cecez-Kecmanovic, Klein, & Brooke 2008). Because of its diversity, interpretivism and critical IS research are more characterized by contradictions and internal tensions, than commonality in empirical focus, methods or underlying theories. However, interpretivist and critical IS researchers do share some investigative concerns and a sense of purpose that distinguishes them as a group from each other as well as from the positivists. From a global level of analysis, it is therefore warranted to speak of three paradigmatic communities rather than just two. At this point it is important to recall that our purpose here is not to arrive at a complete listing of all paradigms and the CoP&K that make up the field, but to prepare the ground for some fundamental conclusions on the community structure across which academic knowledge creation and dissemination is taking place. To this end, we offer four key observations for which it is important that at least two recognized paradigms exist and that potentially perhaps, more can become established:

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1. The IS field has a multi-level community structure. 2. The highest level is characterized by a fundamental division between academic and practitioner orientations with their associated languages rooted in completely different lifeworlds. 3. Within academia, the highest level corresponds to paradigmatic perspectives of which at the current state of evolution there are likely to be three, but this number need not stay fixed. The key point is that since Orlikowski and Baroudi’s analysis in 1991, IS has emerged as a multiple paradigm discipline and is likely to continue to remain one for the foreseeable future. 4. Within the paradigmatic communities, CoP&K are multi-faceted. Their formation has been driven by preferred theories, reference disciplines and research methods. Consider for example, within AIS, there has been the recent formation of a SIG around Research Philosophy and Epistemology (SIGPHIL) and a new SIG is now forming around advancing Grounded Theory.

3.2. Implications for knowledge creation in the different arenas of practice and academia The first implication of the above for knowledge creation is that two globally different arenas of knowledge creation can be distinguished. As an applied field, IS should foster links with various practitioner communities. In this arena, the primary characteristic of what counts as knowledge is that it must be practically useful and contribute to the advancement of practice. Evidence is the actual use of this knowledge by some practitioners. Perhaps the Harvard Business Review or MISQ Executive can be named as examples of where at least a subset of such knowledge is made public. A substantial part of this knowledge is not easily available in a ‘‘public market place of ideas” because the sponsors of the research behind the knowledge often treat it as proprietary. It consists of white papers, consultant reports, internal memoranda, etc. The principal participants in this arena are the academically trained staff of consultancies, major vendor and user companies, and a subset of academics with good industry contacts. The second implication is associated with the knowledge creation process within the academic arena. Its typical participants are research-oriented faculty. The ICIS proceedings and premier journals are the principal outlets where the authors of this kind of knowledge publish it after a rigorous review process. As the push to publish is an important motivation in the academic arena, most of the knowledge that academia values is publicly available to the point that it forms a public market place of ideas. What counts as knowledge in this arena must pass thresholds of scholarly rigor and intellectual creativity. However, the meaning of these criteria is quite different between the three paradigmatic communities that make up the academic arena. In this sense, the arena is much more diverse and hence could be expected to experience much greater communication difficulties than the practitioner research community. In fact even though in principle all knowledge is available to all researchers, it is read very selectively. Loebbecke, Berthod, and Huyskens (2007), for example, note that 80% of journal articles are cited at most twice. However, some notable exceptions exist whereby a single article can garner citations in the hundreds. Such articles are then bestowed the label ‘seminal’. The roots of knowledge creation in this arena are the countless, personal networks of individual researchers. However, their ‘‘ruminations” do not count as ‘‘knowledge” until at least some publicly constituted scholarly meeting has filtered them and caused the authors to refine them. Typically, the working groups and meetings of special interests groups perform this function offering tracks in the major conferences of the field (e.g. IFIP working conferences, ICIS, ECIS, AMCIS). The acceptance of a paper in one of these forums becomes an entry point for a new idea to acquire the lowest status of potential ‘‘knowledge” as recognized by a relatively small group (e.g. a subcommunity of practice and knowing). It should be noted that the congruence of perspectives in such working groups, which have a membership typically from a few dozen to a few hundred members, is much greater than within a particular global paradigm community. There are at least three good reasons for this. First, in order for one of these grassroots working groups to thrive, its members need to subscribe to similar communities of assumptions and ‘‘patterns or rhythms of knowledge exchange” (DeSanctis 2003). This is a prerequisite for allowing intense, relatively friction free communication and constructive critique to filter, restructure and refine ideas. Second, members join by self-selection. Those who fundamentally disagree with the prevailing views tend to leave and find a social environment elsewhere, in which they

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feel more comfortable and hope to gain acceptance for of their research ideas. The groups that survive and evolve some stable patterns tend to meet the criteria of a CoP as defined earlier. Third, most of these groups encourage or even require face-to-face interactions by which the various players gain a holistic appreciation of the viewpoints (‘‘where they are coming from”). They not only build up vivid memories of the most interesting debates, but also of joint lifeworld experiences via the social functions of academic meetings. This all helps to ameliorate misunderstandings and various kinds of conflicts. Thereby the grassroots working groups that have thrived over several years stand a good chance of becoming the core of a specific research community of practice and knowing. If so, their influence begins to radiate beyond their immediate membership. Usually these working groups do not develop into rigid orthodoxies for the following reasons. First to some extent, diversity is guaranteed by overlapping memberships in related grassroots working groups – this is not dysfunctional duplication, but important cross fertilization. Second, in order to attract new members and to replace membership losses, they need to be flexible to accommodate emerging ideas from junior faculty, and advanced doctoral students about to enter the field. Sometimes, out of this diversity, a major intellectual division can evolve and if so, a membership subset may split to form a new special interest group. This may be a loss to the parent group, but a great benefit to the field. It facilitates a constant alignment and realignment at the level where the most detailed, but also the most risky (uncertain) knowledge exists. Concrete examples of groups that function in this way are IFIP WGs and SIGs in AIS. Typically, grassroots working groups that have succeeded in establishing some stability and a shared (oral) sense of history of their work, tend to be most successful with helping some of their members ‘‘to push their best work results upward” to the much larger and diverse audience of whole discipline conferences (such as ICIS, AMCIS and ECIS) and premier journals. However, a weakness is that at these larger conferences most of the attendees come with orientations that are close to the group where the papers originated. Cross-paradigm debates remain rare. (Loebbecke et al. (2007) results of journal readerships suggest a similar weakness for premier journals.) Most readers look for articles, which they can easily relate to their own work. Hermeneutics suggest that these will be articles that build on similar pre-understandings as defined by the fundamental assumptions of a shared paradigm.

3.3. Change in the locus of knowledge creation Our viewpoint of a CoP&K structure of the IS academic community leads us to question what such a perspective means for the locus of knowledge creation in academia. We believe the broader implication of putting multiple interacting CoP&K at the center of research and research dissemination in place of the knowing individual, sometime raised to heroic status (the proverbial Plato, Aristotle, Newton or Einstein) signals a fundamental shift in what the field considers knowledge and how it is grounded. This is an important shift but one which appears to have escaped the field’s attention even though the Kuhnian notion of research as a social process has assumed the status of a mantra duly repeated by almost all. This shift dethrones the subject from its lonely vantage point and places larger communities in charge of innovation and progress. This may explain why sometimes the better product is not recognized as such until a weaker one has already achieved quasi monopoly status and the switching cost has simply become too high because not sticking with the accepted practice isolates the dissenters. This means that what counts as ‘‘valid” knowledge is not defined by the individuals who know most, but by what most individuals (of a CoP&K) know. The shift from knowing individuals to the knowledge standards of a CoP&K also explains why it often takes decades to recognize a valid idea as such until the rest of the CoP catches up. (According to Zukav (2001), this is exactly what happened in Physics.) It also explains why most of the textbook knowledge is out of date by a decade, but only by hindsight when the truths buried in the frontier journals can be distinguished from the hype and misconceptions, which are later discredited. This we believe leads to a subtle shift in the responsibility for knowledge creation from individuals or small groups to larger communities. As an example, consider that a good publication is constructed between authors, reviewers and editors. It is the network of CoP&K that is responsible for knowledge creation.

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This section has focused on the important role that CoP&K play in knowledge creation and dissemination. Such an analysis might create the impression that the Kuhnian type paradigm communities are less important for IS as a discipline, to the point where CoP&K could stand on their own. The next section explains why this impression is misleading, because CoP&K depend in important ways on a supportive paradigm community that is larger and has more resources than most CoP&K can typically marshal. In addition, we shall introduce that idea of fundamental criticism for explaining why the field as a whole is likely to benefit substantially if it embraces more than one paradigm community. 4. Paradigmatic communities: their mission and challenges Typically, CoP do not exist on their own except when the core of a new discipline is being formed. The ‘‘founding fathers” of a new discipline may very well be the ones that form the first CoP. However, earlier we already implied that the CoPs of an established discipline form a network. This section will explore the social environment in which networks of CoP&K are embedded and on which they depend for resources if they are to thrive in the long term. Typically, a CoP&K is too small to create and maintain the resources that it needs such as an infrastructure3. Hence, there arises the need for some sort of embedding social collectivity. Typically, this is an established discipline. 4.1. On the relationships between a discipline, paradigmatic identities, and communities of practice and knowing This raises the question of what is the relationship between a discipline, paradigmatic identities, and communities of practice and knowing? Paradigmatic identities are formed around differing constellations of beliefs concerning the nature of reality (e.g. ontology), what constitutes valid knowledge (epistemology), including principles and values that should guide proper academic inquiry (research methods and ethics). Such broad constellations of beliefs cross disciplinary lines, for example interpretivist beliefs existed in sociology before they entered IS research. Typically, the adherents of a certain paradigm do not organize into an association, for example there is not an association of positivists or interpretivists across multiple disciplines. As a consequence, the adherents of a paradigm do not have a center of coordination that commands resources for organizing paradigm-based activities. This is different for academic disciplines. It is very difficult to define exactly when a loosely recognized field of study or literature body of knowledge passes the threshold to form the core of an academic discipline. Both Toulmin (1972) and Foucault (1972,1973) have attempted to describe this. In particular Foucault’s historical analysis of how medicine evolved into a discipline is informative for IS as discussed in Hassan and Will (2006) and Hassan (2006). Based on their analysis we can say – in a simplified manner – that a necessary defining characteristic of a discipline is that it must have a subject matter (‘‘objects of inquiry”) that the adherents of one discipline recognize as – more or less – uniquely distinguishing their particular discipline from all others. Of course, such a core subject matter is likely to be contested during the formative stages of new disciplines. In the early days of IS, established disciplines like Computer Science, Operations Research, and Accounting all laid claim to IS and tried to impose their rules of inquiry on IS researchers. This points us to a second characteristic of disciplines. They must be in a position to maintain discourses and over time specify a set of rules governing the quality of these discourses, which enable the members of a discipline to select the ideas and findings that will be recognized as ‘valid knowledge’. According to Hassan and Will (2006, p. 157), ‘‘. . .discourses are the basis of which coherent (or incoherent) propositions are built up, more or less exact descriptions developed, verifications carried out, [and] theories deployed. They form the precondition of what is later revealed and which later functions as an item of knowledge or an illusion, an accepted truth or an exposed error (Foucault 1972, p. 182)”.

3 In principle, CoP&K could survive - even thrive - without much concern for the status of the discipline to which they are aligned so long as there is a larger social environment providing a reservoir of potential membership candidates and resources on which CoP&K depend for their work; and that they cannot create themselves (such as an infrastructure of conferences and journals, and a central group for coordination such as the AIS and its associated websites).

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The discourse concept in Foucault’s sense must not be confused with academic debates as they may occur in faculty seminars. Discourse in the sense as defined here are the formal disciplinary processes by which proposed truths become accepted or rejected. In IS such rules of discourse have been widely discussed in, for example, the relevance vs. rigor debate. This debate made it very clear that IS operates with multiple sets of discourse rules, because of its status as a ‘‘fragmented adhocracy” (cf. Banville & Landry 1989). From this observation we can see that paradigmatic affinities or attitudes enter the discourse of a discipline, i.e. but a discipline need not agree on a single paradigm. This conclusion follows not only from Ritzer’s (1975, 1991, 2001) analysis of multiple paradigm sciences, but also from Hassan’s detailed examination of Toulmin’s and Foucault’s writings on the nature of disciplines. The social link or gateway by which multiple paradigms enter a discipline is through its communities of practice and knowing. The members of CoP&K gather their ideas from their personal reading profiles. Some of them may have a degree in – or other exposure to – reference disciplines such as sociology, anthropology or philosophy where differing paradigms were established before they entered IS. Their contributions undermined the monolithic positivist rules that Orlikowski and Baroudi (1991) still found to be prevailing in the IS literature in 1991. The paradigmatic commitments of the CoP&K thus influence which methods and theories emerge as the preferred ones and this in turn then affects the selection of conference themes, keynote speakers, special journal issues and other signs of reputation by which rules and principles of discourse gain legitimation in the eyes of the membership. We can thus see that the relationship between diverse CoP&K and their embedding discipline will not be free from tensions. Nevertheless, as long as there is tacit agreement on the core subject matter they will tend to stick together because of shared interests around which the members of a discipline can rally. There is safety for all in numbers and a shared interest in maintaining an active discipline that is visible to outsiders, who are not interested in the details of dozens of CoP&K where the actual research work is done. 4.2. The dependence of CoP&K on an embedding discipline More specifically, we can identify three principal concerns why CoP&K depend on greater size of larger paradigm or disciplinary communities. They are critical mass, external representation, and fundamental (cross-paradigm) criticism. Critical mass is important not just for marshalling the financial resources associated with maintaining the structures necessary for regular discourses, but also for credibility and leadership. One can see this within the context of IS where membership grew from a few hundred (as evidenced by attendance at the first ICIS conference in 1980 of about 180 participants) to the emergence of a formal IS organization (AIS) in 1994 which eventually took over ICIS and other IS conferences and now has a membership of over 30004. For critical mass to occur, there is also the expectation that membership growth over a sufficient time duration will take place so as to create trust in a continuing stability. Indeed, this may be more important than any absolute membership number. In addition, for gaining credibility, there must be a core group from which competent leadership can emerge. This core group must perceive significant benefits from founding a new discipline both for itself and meeting the needs of future members. While CoP&K can and often do hold specialized meetings, they benefit considerably by having them as part of larger disciplinary conferences where newcomers can easily explore them and established members do not have to spend significant extra resources to maintain their presence. Size or mass is also an important factor for formal and informal external representation. Formal external representation concerns communications with government agencies, funding bodies, sponsors etc. The importance of this kind of representation was one of the principal reasons behind the formation of AIS. Informal external representation is occurring if we as individuals need to convey to others to which group we ‘belong’ or associate within social or professional gatherings. We all need some shorthand label to respond in brief when asked what we do for a living, because in casual contacts, exter4 Similar considerations would apply to the founding of some of IS’s sister disciplines, e.g. the International Communication Association (ICA), or the transformation of the Operations Research Society of America (ORSA) and The Institute of Management Sciences (TIMS) into INFORMS. Of course, in contrast to AIS or ICA, INFORMS embraces more than just one discipline and has more members than IS.

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nals (including practitioners) are not particularly interested in the details of the sub-communities (CoP&K) on which we rely for advancing our research and teaching competence. They want some recognizable label such as IS or MIS faculty, by which to classify us, and we need to be associated with some recognizable label for credibility. The formation of AIS offered a bone fide label for the purpose of formal and informal external representation. A third reason why CoP&K depend on a larger discipline (possibly embracing CoP&K with contrary paradigmatic commitments) is the giving and taking critique of fundamental criticism. This type of critique is important because the orientations within a specific CoP&K are often too congruent to challenge the basic assumptions on which new work rests. As a result, the critique from within related CoP&K is likely to be incremental unless its membership comes with diverse paradigmatic commitments. (An example for this is SIGOUT – Special Interest Group on OUTsourcing – but this situation may be somewhat rare.) Incremental criticism is also very important, because it is needed to clarify and promote the message that an author has in mind with a new idea. Even across different CoP&K the critique is likely to be incremental if the members share the same paradigmatic assumptions. For example, design science and traditional ISD are not the same, but will tend to reinforce similar blind spots (cf. Niehaves 2007 for an analysis of this example). By the same token, hermeneutic ethnographers and phenomenologists do not agree on all points, but they will not question the basic foundations of interpretivism on which both of these research approaches rest. 4.3. Fundamental criticism and some examples Therefore, to challenge fundamental assumptions, CoP&K depend on discourses with adherents of different paradigms. We call this type of critique ‘‘fundamental criticism” based on Etzioni’s analysis of its importance for the functioning of democratic societies. In order to explain the significance of this type of fundamental criticism for academia as a whole, it is necessary to see its role in society first and then go from there to the more specific, i.e. from the level of society to the level of academia and its disciplinary discourses. For the societal level, Etzioni (1968) defines fundamental criticism as: ‘‘the function of those sub-units whose task is to overview the communities-of-assumptions and challenge them when they become detached from reality.” (Etzioni 1968, p. 181). He suggests that, if progress is to be made in society, there is a ‘‘societal need for fundamental criticism”. This is similar to Alvesson and Deetz’s position that ‘‘The point of social science is not to get it right but to challenge guiding assumptions, fixed meanings and relations” (Alvesson & Deetz 2000, p. 107). Such fundamental criticism is needed not only at the highest level of society but also at the level of social institutions (e.g. courts, schools, medicine, academia, churches) all the way to business organizations. Etzioni (1968) says that this critical function requires one or more sub-units relatively immune from societal pressure which allow for and even reward the questioning of basic assumptions. These societal sub-units are the free press, national legislatures, and academics in research centers and universities. Tenured faculty members have the necessary basic autonomy from undue economic and political pressures, ‘‘at least in the leading universities” to undertake such fundamental criticism. Indeed, Etzioni notes that fundamental criticism is one of the most important functions of the press, the legislatures, and tenured faculty. Within science, the premier journals have traditionally accepted a limited number of articles falling in this category, albeit at times with hesitation. An early example of this was the debate between Churchman, Ackoff and Checkland, and their opponents in Management Science (cf. Ackoff 1979; Ackoff 1987; Checkland 1981; Corbett & Wassenhove 1993). Etzioni (1968) also points out that consensus amongst intellectuals is not a prerequisite for the effective discharge of their critical function and this should be kept in mind when applying the concept to academic disciplines and the state of communications in the IS research community. Fundamental criticism requires that the established communities-of-assumptions be challenged and that alternative ones be provided, but it does not require that all intellectuals agree.

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‘‘It is not the function of the intellectuals to provide consensus, an agreed-upon line of action; that is the function of the political process. The intellectuals’ role is to pry open the walls in which society tends to box itself and suggest various directions which the freed prisoner may take; which ones are preferred is to be decided by the community as a whole. To demand consensus from intellectuals is to assume that the questions involved can be selected empirically and rationally while actually they are, in part, normative issues, and to assume that they can be settled by an elite while actually they must be worked out in societal consensus-building. The intellectuals enrich the debate, both on the elite and the public level, and often are needed to keep it alive, but this can be fully achieved, even better achieved, without consensus among the intellectuals” (Etzioni 1968, p. 186). For the case of IS in academia, this means that we should not expect that cross-paradigm debates should lead to some sort of agreement, and then the founding of a ‘‘cumulative tradition”. On the contrary, this might even be dysfunctional, as it could create a new orthodoxy. Nevertheless, it would be equally dysfunctional if different views making up a multi-paradigm science (cf. Ritzer 2001) would simply ignore each other, because in this case nobody would take on the role ‘‘to pry open the walls in which a CoP&K tends to box itself and suggest various directions which the freed prisoner may take”, as Etzioni’s phrase from above would seem to imply for academia. Neither would it be required or even desirable that all critique is fundamental in nature, because then the important role of incremental critique would suffer. Finally, it is not necessary that all or even most members of a CoP&K engage in fundamental criticism as long as some leading members do so and pass on the lessons learnt to the rank and file. Is there evidence that the field has engaged in fundamental criticism? If so there should be some opinion pieces or landmark articles in our premier journals. In thinking about what such landmark articles could be, it may be helpful to recall that along with the emergence of the paradigm discussion, two new types or genres of publications emerged. One was focused mostly on fundamental criticism, the other, on analyzing alternative paradigms and introduced metatheorizing into the IS research literature. Perhaps the first example of fundamental criticism in IS was Mason and Mitroff (1973). They provided a research framework that at its time challenged the prevailing orthodoxy because it drew on Churchman’s systems approach5. This approach was explicitly critical of the fundamental assumptions governing Management Science and Operation Research to the standards of which IS had begun to aspire. In contrast, Ives, Hamilton, and Davis (1980) defined IS in terms of five environments (external, organization, user, IS development and IS operations), three processes (user, IS development and IS operations), and an information subsystem. This article contributed to fundamental criticism by providing a clear description of the ruling concept of IS. The Ives et al. notion was challenged by Kling’s (1980) ‘social web model’ which conceived of IS as an organic social system in contrast to the ‘discrete-entity model’ prevalent in earlier views of IS. Banville and Landry (1989) also challenged the orthodoxy in their view of ‘‘IS as a fragmented adhocracy”. It was a type of fundamental critique because it challenged the notion that IS needs a cumulative tradition, as for example noted by Keen (1980). There existed a second genre of publications which also built on paradigm clarification and analysis, but gave less play to the role of criticism and more to spreading an understanding of the nature and contents of differing paradigms. Hirschheim and Klein (1989) demonstrated this in some detail for the core domain of the IS development (ISD) literature. Their approach analyzed ongoing, international research projects on alternative approaches to ISD (e.g. SSM vs. the DEMOS project) and international conferences proceedings on ISD methods, especially the series of IFIP Working Group 8.1 CRIS (Comparative Review of IS) working conferences. Orlikowski and Baroudi (1991) deepened and broadened this sort of analysis considerably by examining the methodological stance of the field’s research publications that had appeared in some of the premier publications outlets at that time (Management Science, MISQ, CACM, and the ICIS conference proceedings). By coding the IS literature in these particular outlets in terms of observable ‘‘research philosophies” they demonstrated that the field still con-

5 They proposed that the core components of IS should be: (1) A psychological type (of the user); (2) A class of problems to be solved; (3) An organizational context; (4) Multiple methods of evidence generation and an explicit guarantor of evidence; and (5) Alternative modes of presentation of the output of an IS.

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formed to a consensus on a cohesive scientific method similar to that first identified by Ives et al. (1980). However, in the second part of their article they also concluded that the future of IS research would most likely belong to a more diverse set of ‘‘research philosophies”. The emergence of the interpretivist literature stream (e.g. Klein & Myers 1999) and the publication analysis performed by Chen and Hirschheim (2004) have since corroborated their vision. And Richardson and Robinson (2007) have recently offered good reasons to believe that a third paradigm (Critical Research) may surface soon. This is evident in an article by Hirschheim, Klein, and Lyytinen (1996) where the authors recast the IS literature using a critical social action framework based on Habermas’s (1987) Theory of Communicative Action. There also exist some promising – if indeed small in number – recent examples of fundamental criticism; it surfaces in some of the reports published by the Senior Scholar Consortium in the ICIS proceedings. We have also witnessed the appearance of fundamental criticism in some of the ICIS, AMCIS and ECIS panels. The disadvantage of panels is that they often leave no archival record as to what transpired during the course of the panel although CAIS has been publishing some these discussions (cf. Kock et al., 2002). Another good example of fundamental criticism (albeit not in article form) is the King and Lyytinen (2006) compilation of controversial IS articles. Their monograph combines mutually critical contributions on the status of the field into a single source where the various article authors had the opportunity to critique opposing views. The key problem for the field is that there does not exist a systemic focus on the important role that fundamental criticism could play for the future of IS as a discipline. Such a systemic role would necessitate it being a standard component of doctoral consortia and publication outlets (conference tracks, special journal issues, etc.). Nor does fundamental criticism seem to play an explicitly defined role in the reviewing process. However, it could be changed. For example, we could have dialectically structured panels with pre-written position statements that are published in the proceedings or dialectically structured conference sessions calling for fundamentally opposed opinion pieces or papers on topical and controversial issues. In any event, we must conclude that the articulation and communication of fundamental criticism is in need of expanding. 4.4. Metatheorizing With the benefit of hindsight we can see that the status of a multiple paradigm science provided a basis for the emergence of two new genres of publications. The first genre was just introduced, namely articles or essays focusing on fundamental criticism. The second genre of publications are less focused on fundamental criticism, but more on understanding the make up of different paradigms and their conceptual interrelationships. Adopting Ritzer’s (1991, 2001) terminology, this second genre engages in metatheorizing. It has some important implications for gaining a better understanding of community structures and knowledge creation in IS research. Ordinary theorizing is concerned with reasoning about some real world phenomenon in terms of a system of concepts and ideas. In ordinary theorizing, the object of the research is a discernable phenomenon of the social or physical world. In metatheorizing, we study existing theories rather than the social or physical world directly. In contrast to theorizing, the object of research in metatheorizing are the theories proposed by others in ordinary theorizing. With reference to sociology, Ritzer expressed this idea as follows: ‘‘To put it (too) strongly, a metatheorist is one who studies sociological theories of the social world, while a theorist is one who studies the social world more directly in order to create (or apply) sociological theory” (Ritzer 2001 p. 14). With the caveat ‘‘To put it (too) strongly . . .”, Ritzer warns that the two categories can overlap within the same publication. Most theorists also engage in some metatheorizing and vice versa (cf. Ritzer 2001, p.14; similarly Ritzer 1991, pp. 2–3). In line with this, many examples of metatheorizing also exist in the IS literature (e.g. Hevner et al. 2004; Hirschheim & Klein 1989; Walsham 1993), often co-mingled in the same publications with fundamental criticism, as the two genres in the past were not clearly recognized as such. Particularly influential was the observation that Orlikowski and Baroudi (1991) derived from their metatheorizing, namely there existed a lack of diversity in IS research. They found:

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‘‘that although information systems research is not rooted in a single over-arching theoretical perspective, it does exhibit a single set of philosophical assumptions regarding the underlying nature of phenomenon being investigated, the appropriate research methods to be used, and the nature of valid evidence” (Orlikowski & Baroudi 1991, p. 2). The importance of metatheorizing lies in its potential to help followers of differing paradigms to better understand their counterparts. This potential is most obvious from one of the most widely quoted, classical monographs of metatheorizing by Burrell and Morgan (1979). One essential aspect of not only fundamental criticism, but for disciplinary survival, is the need to be able to communicate across the myriad global (paradigmatic) communities. As we noted earlier, this is far from straightforward as the field has experienced – almost from its beginning – significant communication gaps. Overcoming these communications gaps, especially via boundary spanning, has become a key challenge for the IS field. 5. Opportunities for boundary spanning among multiple CoP&K and possible approaches So far we have argued that the regular communication needs of IS as a whole are met in its communities of practice and knowing where the most detailed expertise is located. In addition, some global cross-paradigm communication is needed to overcome the potential blind spots that may curtail the vision at the local level, which is within CoP&K. This, however, misses the communication needs that are typical for applied disciplines which have both practitioner and academic constituencies; and where the latter is responsible for educating students to become practitioners. This suggests distinguishing two types of boundary spanning needs: one for the purpose of fundamental criticism within academia; and the other, between various academic CoP&K and their practitioner partners. Since we have already discussed some of the issues associated with fundamental criticism with academia above, we focus here on boundary spanning strategies for dealing with the practitioner community. Overcoming the communication gap that exists between IS practitioners and academics is without question, one of the field’s major challenges, as we noted before in Hirschheim and Klein (2003, p. 253). First, the view of IS which is held by IS practitioners is at best only partially supported by some of the theories that guide IS research (e.g., structuration theory, agency theory, and actor network theory). In part this is a result of the pressure in MBA education to keep all courses focused on purposefully rational concepts and relevant skills. Second, the view held by non-IS practitioners, i.e., senior management or business unit managers, is even more at odds with the academic notions of information systems and also quite different from the IS practitioners’ beliefs about the nature of IS. Many of these managers have degrees outside of management. Their views are then shaped by the assumptions underlying these degrees (provided they have degrees at all) moderated with crash courses in ‘‘executive education”, which often are even more narrowly focused than MBA curricula. This contributes to a credibility crises of IS as a whole that engulfs both academia and practice. To address these deficits, we called for a new research priority to create better ‘‘understanding of our organizational stakeholders” and to develop social boundary spanning ‘‘knowledge creation and transformation networks” (Hirschheim & Klein 2003). Of course, these networks need to reach out to all stakeholders and constituencies that are of importance to IS as a discipline, including the practitioner community. This is crucial because without connecting to the outside and achieving outside validation, IS as an academic discipline in the longer term is at risk of loosing its legitimacy regardless of how much ‘‘vibrancy” exists within its internal processes. The problem for the field is how to connect with the outside practitioner community. 5.1. On the communication gap with practitioner CoP&K The communication of academics with practitioner CoP&K is typically the most difficult, because they subscribe to two differing ideals of knowledge and very different processes by which knowledge can be acquired. The primary concern of academia has always been theoretical knowledge (episteme in the sense of Aristotle). This has been true all the way back to Scholasticism. In modern times, academ-

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ics have primarily valued knowledge in the form of theories. The bias towards theory has led to the disavowal of practice and reflection in the modern era from the Renaissance and the Age of Enlightenment forward. Academia values what is intellectually interesting, as rigorous as possible and based on rules of evidence. It learns this type of knowledge through courses, readings and the publication process. In contrast, practitioners tend to value what is useful as tested by what worked for them regardless of whether it is theoretically grounded and generalizeable. Only to a very limited extent can practitioners acquire this type of knowledge through course work and readings. Much of it is tacit and cannot be articulated. Indeed, hardly anyone doubts that people can acquire knowledge through experience and display it in task performance in the absence of conscious awareness of what they have learned. This implicit learning (Kihlstrom, Dorfman, & Park 2007) may be ineffable, and not always easy to get in touch with, but it can process more information on a more sophisticated level than most of us ever dreamed. Some psychologists now say that far from being the opposite of effective problem solving, intuition is inseparable from it (Gigerenzer, 2007). Moreover, Khatri and Ng (2000) argue that such intuitive knowledge does not come easy, it is not simply armchair reflection, but a kind of wisdom that comes with age, requiring years of engaged experience to be learnt and applied effectively. Studies of these kinds of human competencies, which could be called experience-based or application-based knowledge, seem to confirm that it takes approximately a decade of heavy labor to master any field (Ross 2006). It can typically only be acquired through intensive work in professional environments, such as law, medicine or management. For this reason, the disavowal of application-based knowledge by academics for its lack of articulation and proof is hardly justified6. This is not to say that this type of knowledge does not have severe limits, too, and that practitioners sometimes misapply it or overestimate the reach of past successes. Because this type of knowledge is very different from academia’s, it should be treated as complementary to it. Whereas this characterization of the two types of knowledge explains why we should expect a communication gap between academic and practitioner CoP&K, it does not suggest how to overcome the communication deficit. For this purpose specific boundary spanning strategies need to be pursued. 5.2. Approaches to boundary spanning with practitioner CoP&K We can identify two major approaches that could support boundary spanning. The first is the creation of boundary spanning objects, the second relates to changes in doctoral level education. In the latter, we are aware of at least three possibilities: (i) educating a base of doctoral students who will go out to industry upon completion of their degrees; (ii) professional doctorates for individuals who come from industry and want a doctoral degree, but will not become research-oriented academics; and (iii) providing special doctoral programs of study for professionally qualified doctoral students with significant industry CoP experience looking for a career change by becoming research-oriented academics while at the same time, maintaining their industry interactions to serve as external boundary spanners. The special doctoral education for these types of students would encourage them to capitalize on their prior industry experience and stock of knowledge for building their research programs including their dissertation project. The spectrum of options for doctoral education outlined in the following hopefully would create candidates with different talents and motivation. Such is desirable as it would allow them to engage in different kinds of boundary spanning activities, however all would be capable of communicating across the current divide of academia and practice. This could be further enhanced through the existence of ‘executive professors’ or ‘executives in residence’ who retire from industry and take non-tenure track positions in academia. Their in-depth knowledge of practice, including their contacts, make them excellent vehicles for boundary spanning7. 6 Klein and Rowe (2007) point out that neural research has provided hard empirical evidence for the existence of this type of experience based knowledge, which also has a long philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle’s comparison of ‘‘phronesis” with episteme (theory) and techne (methods or technique). Gadamer and Habermas referred to this as applicative knowledge. 7 It should be noted that ‘practice’ is not a monolithic front but just as highly differentiated as academia. There is executive level management (CEO, board), senior functional management of whom the CIO function deserves special attention for the IS field, consultants, vendors, and last but not least, IS workers. It could be expected that different doctoral students will gravitate to one or two clusters with whom they work best while not losing all connection to their academic counterparts thus being able to bridge the divide both ways.

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(1) Boundary spanning objects: If the name of the game in IS research is innovation and knowledge creation which depend on multiple interacting CoP&K then we need to pay more attention to creating boundary spanning objects and to educating some proportion of the future research community (i.e. faculty) to take on the role of active boundary spanners in their careers. This issue can be addressed and to some extent already has been addressed in building the infrastructure of our field. A good example of boundary objects within academia is the AIS World website on ‘methods and theories’ covering alternative research methods (http://www.aisworld.org/). This has served as a boundary spanning artifact for facilitating communication among different research sub-communities, especially in doctoral education. Other good examples are the ICIS, AMCIS, ECIS doctoral workshops and a number of the SIGs that help to span differing research orientations. For example, SIGPHIL has tried to foster a dialogue across different philosophical orientations. Having said this, we note that AIS World currently offers few boundary objects that help Universitybased researchers to understand practitioner communities and link with them. For example, a simple list of groundbreaking industry research projects under way could help academics to keep up with important trends in practice. It could also help them to find potentially beneficial partners for boundary spanning communications. And the reverse is also true. A list of University-based research activities could facilitate interaction for industry-based researchers with their potential interaction partners in academia. Of course, trade secret policies might be a major obstacle to implementing this in a comprehensive way. While it could be argued that the boundary objects appear to have been addressed (at least to some modest extent) through the AIS infrastructure as far as internal communication between different academic communities are concerned, the need for the special education of future external boundary spanners to the world outside academia does not seem to have received the same attention. This is an important point but worrying, because the boundary spanning issue among different CoP&K within the IS field with CoP&K in industry and the non-profit sector does not seem to have been dealt with very well. Indeed, the lack of discussion about this issue is troubling because the question of what the relationship of IS academia with practitioner CoP&K should be is a much more divisive issue than what the relationship should be between IS and its sister and reference disciplines. Different segments of the IS community have different ideas about the relative importance of the academic community to the practitioner community and this dissensus contributes to the field’s so-called relevancy and external legitimation crisis8. Fortunately, the CoP&K viewpoint could help to move the field ahead in terms of better understanding the nature of its internal and external problems that it currently faces as well as how boundary spanning could help to overcome the problems. For example, to improve cross-community communication, the field as a whole needs to invest in educating typical boundary spanners that are not just academically informed, but bring ‘real world’ experience to their training. (2) Providing PhD level training to future managers: PhD programs in IS – at least in North America – are geared toward the production of IS academics. The training is heavily ‘academic’ in its orientation with too little emphasis placed on practice. But why should PhD graduates stay in academia? We believe that an important group of boundary spanners would be individuals going through a PhD program and then taking jobs in industry. These individuals would have a much better appreciation for what academic research is about and how to engage in research which would have an applied orientation. They could also help in establishing relationships between industry and academia which would improve both research and teaching, and in the long term, help ameliorate industry’s belief that academics only sit in their ivory towers and engage in research which is irrelevant for industry9. Whilst 8 The issue of academia-industry relations is a complex one. Whereas all academics seem to agree that some form of practitioner relationships is mandatory, at least three very different positions have been advanced. The first is that industry should lead; academia should basically serve industry’s recruiting needs by teaching the leading edge of industry applications and cooperate with industry on addressing the problems as seen by leading practitioners. The second (and opposite extreme) is that IS research should look beyond the commercial interests of industry and teach for the future, primarily based on insights derived from theoretically guided research. A third view is that both academia and industry should have their own special spheres of core competencies generating further controversy just what these competencies should be. For example, should academia serve society’s need for independent, fundamental criticism (cf. Etzioni 1968), because neither industry not politics can provide this function. 9 Another option would be to have some academics become consultants during their sabbatical leaves. So instead of using the time to do more academic research, the time would be spent working with industry.

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the education and then placement of such individuals might require a change in the attitude of US organizations who apparently do not value PhDs, this is certainly not the case in other parts of the globe, e.g. Europe. To produce such boundary spanners would require the acceptance of dissertations which were more applied in nature. It would also require the IS academic community to recognize that a significant number of doctoral students come from CoP&K that are external to the IS academic community, yet of major importance for its external legitimation (such as management and IS professionals). The past interaction patterns of these students and their knowledge acquired through their past affiliations is often poorly leveraged in current doctoral program structures. Most of these programs seek to impart a new academic identity which devalues the past identity as an experienced practitioner. We believe that a more balanced and sensitive approach to the doctoral education of crossovers from practice could empower them to make a valuable contribution to the discipline as boundary spanners over the course of their future careers either working from the industry side or from within academia if they wish to pursue a career change (see point 4 below). In many ways, the doctoral programs in the German speaking countries such as Germany, Austria and Switzerland do the former: the majority of doctoral students take industry jobs after earning their doctorates. They take the knowledge they acquire from the academic CoP&K and apply it to the practitioner CoP&K. Moreover, because they understand the nature of academic IS, they are more likely to help IS academic researchers gain access to their respective organizations. Such boundary spanning is necessary for a thriving IS discipline. In the US, where doctoral students typically do not go to industry, the field needs to foster the entry of students who are crossovers from practice. (3) Executive doctorates: The field could also involve itself in offering a ‘practical’ doctorate, called an Executive Doctorate in Business (EDB) rather than PhD. Such a doctoral degree would provide high level material for practitioners who want to stay in practice. EDB programs already exist in many parts of the world and are likely to become more wide-spread in the US educational system for a number of reasons, not the least of which is because the executive education market could generate significant revenue to Business Schools. To be sure, the EDB could facilitate boundary spanning if such academic boundary spanning was to include a rigorous thesis requirement as the prerequisite for future publications in applied research journals. Without proper training in the academic publication culture, the knowledge transfer that boundary spanners could make to practitioner CoP&K, would be greatly impaired. We therefore see the program as providing a significant degree of both rigor and relevance. (4) Providing special doctoral programs of study for professionally qualified doctoral students with significant industry CoP experience who are looking to become academics. Such individuals desire a career change by becoming research-oriented academics while at the same time, wishing to maintain their industry interactions, thereby serving as external boundary spanners. The development of special doctoral education for these types of students would encourage them to capitalize on their prior industry experience and stock of knowledge for building their research programs including their dissertation project. But as noted above, individuals who bring such significant industry experience to their doctoral education and then wish to continue with an applied focus in their research, will have to be properly catered for within the IS academic community. This may take the form of changes to the field’s (and universities’) view of what constitutes ‘acceptable’ work towards tenure and promotion. Although many universities have in place promotion paths for non-tenure track and clinical faculty, what exists may not be sufficient. Overall, the issue of career paths for such individuals is an important issue that the field needs to get a handle on because boundary spanning is vital for the long-term success of the discipline. Whilst these doctoral education strategies – at least in the long run – may help mitigate some of the deleterious effects of the fundamentally different practitioner and academic CoP&K, it remains to be seen how effective they turn out to be. Spanning the boundaries between practice and academia may well prove to be the toughest challenge the field faces. Because the type of knowledge, the type of experience, the type of learning that each of these communities values, are so fundamentally different spanning the boundaries between academia and practice might be an issue that can at best be managed with varying strategies over time, but never totally be resolved. Beyond the challenge of spanning the boundaries of practitioner and academic CoP&K, we recognize a second significant challenge. It revolves around how the field could benefit from the stimulation and flexibility of diversity that the status of a multiple paradigm science offers without succumbing to

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the centrifugal tendencies that this status also tends to generate. This is something that Ritzer recognized as early as 1975, and to which we now turn our attention. 6. Discussion: risks and opportunities of multiple paradigm sciences We have argued that IS is a multiple paradigm science. The paradigm concept is useful for characterizing and understanding major divisions in the field. It helps to explain why these divisions exist and why they are fruitful for the field. However, looking at the relationships between communities committed to conflicting paradigms within a discipline also suggests that natural tensions exist among them, which surface most visibly in communications gaps that are difficult to overcome. Boundary spanning across the paradigm communities whilst desirable remains a major challenge. Despite the call for sensitivity to alternative paradigms, little cross-paradigmatic work or even discussion in the major conferences is visible. Nevertheless, one might be tempted to argue that – so far at least – the benefits of such a multiparadigm discipline have outweighed the risks since the IS discipline has successfully grown and become ‘established’ over the past 40 years. But should we accept such success as evidence that the field will continue to thrive or might there be dangers on the horizon? The purpose of this section is to discuss some of the risks and opportunities for the field. 6.1. Long term risks for multiple paradigm sciences At the University level, it is not unheard of that sociology or philosophy departments have split along the divides of conflicting schools of thought, because they could no longer compromise on practical issues in their day to day affairs. In principle, this could happen at the disciplinary level as well. Earlier we pointed to sound economic and organizational reasons why it is beneficial for paradigm communities to have a common infrastructure supporting the activities at the CoP&K level with enough cohesion to afford all members the ability to represent themselves to outsiders as belonging to a large and recognizable academic association. For this situation to continue, something more than simply economic-organizational efficiencies may be needed to maintain internal and external integrity: viz. an identity. But how? It seems clear that in multiple paradigm sciences such an identity cannot come from a cumulative tradition a la Kuhn since the very fact that there is more than one paradigm means there cannot exist one identity. Therefore, from a Kuhnian perspective this would be a contradiction in terms. Additionally, the fact that the discipline’s cumulative tradition appears problematic might have more to do with the inherent differences between the natural sciences and the social/cultural sciences than anything specific to IS. For the social/cultural sciences, competing paradigm perspectives may be the permanent state, but this does not mean that there could not be a feeling of identity and belonging to a common discipline as long as there is enough agreement that we address largely overlapping research domains and issues, albeit with different perspectives and methods. In fact, because of the lack of a cumulative tradition, a shared identity might be even more important. So where could such an identity come from? 6.2. The need for a shared sense of history and collective accomplishments We could take our cues from the disciplines of philosophy, sociology and society as a whole. Ever since the rejection of a Hobbesian Leviathan ideal of a unified society, pluralism in society has been on the rise. The failure of the Diet of Worms in 1521 was the first major blow undermining the idea of one empire under one faith and one form of government committed to this faith, which was the dream of Emperor Charles V. In fact, pluralism and multi-culturalism has been at the core of many Western societies after the age of enlightenment. Yet many Western societies including America have a strong sense of national identity. So where does such a strong identity come from? A common observation is that it comes from a strong sense of a shared history inculcated in the schools, churches, military and other institutions.

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As a second example, we refer to the discipline of philosophy. This discipline has been notorious for its fragmentation into conflicting schools of thought and the acrimonious debate amongst them. Yet, philosophers feel a strong attachment to their discipline. Again, we would suggest that one important reason for this is the strong emphasis on teaching the discipline’s history. Gadamer provides philosophical support for our contention of the relationship between having a shared history and forming a strong identity and belonging. In his theory of understanding (called philosophical hermeneutics) he contends that a shared sense of history provides the ultimate grounding and background information (pre-understanding) for communication in large and diverse collectives such as societies (and by extension to diverse disciplines). A fortiori, the same should apply to the IS discipline as it continues to grow and diversify. However, asking if such a shared sense of history is being imparted to the members who make up the field of IS, the answer, we would contend, is a resounding ‘no’. The last serious analysis of the history of the field was done more than a quarter of century ago (i.e. Dickson 1981). Can it be surprising then that the discipline struggles to have a shared identity? We contend that whilst a cumulative tradition may be elusive, a shared sense of historical consciousness is achievable if the senior members of the field provide the necessary cognitive and motivational leadership. Of course, the history of our discipline is itself ambiguous and open to differing interpretations. Therefore, we need concise historical analyses of the evolution of the field from more than one paradigm perspective and including different regions of the world. We would hope that a core of shared historical understandings would emerge from such analyses on how IS as a field evolved and what its principal milestone achievements were along the way. Institutionally, AIS’s AIS World – already serving as a boundary spanning object – would be the preferred place for opening up a generally accessible history section with pertinent resource materials. Examples of such resources would include wikis, blogs, webinars, and selected historical analyses with review comments. Even Kuhn would seem to agree with our call for creating a sense of shared history. After outlining why the difficulties of measuring progress (of a science or any other academic discipline) cannot be resolved by finding a good definition of progress, he insists that questions of changes in technique or method: ‘‘. . . will cease to be a course of concern not when a definition is found, but when the groups that now doubt their own status achieve consensus about their past and present accomplishments” (Kuhn 1970, p. 161) The development of a shared sense of history should concentrate on past accomplishments and leave the identification of present accomplishment the subject of ongoing debates – which currently are mostly missing. Kuhn also points out that during the Renaissance, little distance existed between the arts and sciences. Outstanding men like Leonardo moved freely between them and both arts and sciences were perceived to ‘‘progress” giving rise to the optimism in the early stages of modernity. For example, the art of painting was seen as a cumulative discipline demonstrating progress without doubt as long as there was agreement that the artists’ principal goal was faithful representation (cf. Kuhn 1970, p. 161). What does this imply for IS as an applied field? First, with reference to art, even though it may have rather loosely defined standards, it nevertheless can be seen to ‘progress’. The same could be considered with respect to the qualitative nature of some past research achievements, Thus, this need not stand in the way of an inclusive debate of the field’s history. Second, we need to note that ‘‘the groups” in the above quote correspond to what we defined more precisely as CoP&K and that there is not likely to be any consensus on goals among them in the foreseeable future. However, this does not invalidate the value of history as a basis of understanding and interpreting a shared past. In order to facilitate more communication between the differing CoP&K constituting the IS field, creating a shared sense of history is needed so the field’s members first can acquire a common background understanding of the main milestone achievements, people and institutions. This will then naturally provide an orientation on how each member’s research fits into the larger picture, which should lead to a sense of belonging. The many twists and turns of the field that ultimately led to a paradigmatic split during the 1980s and the subsequent proliferation of CoP&K is something each of us in the field can be proud of if we see it as evidence of past progress. Only by knowing and understanding the many streams which have

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shaped the current landscape can we collectively prepare for the field’s future even if we cannot agree what the best future or futures might be. Perhaps a shared sense of history is more effective in helping with bridging the communication gaps than with obtaining consensus on preferred forms of knowledge creation. Isn’t it easier for all of us to agree on what has been accomplished by the field in the past than on what we should do in the future for advancing knowledge creation? By seeing alternative visions of the discipline’s future against a shared historical backdrop, each of us can obtain a sense of the larger meaning of our individual contributions and a better understanding of the potential contribution of the work of others. We believe that a better grasp of IS history is a more feasible strategy for improving mutual understanding between differing paradigm communities than expecting a unified frame of reference for future work. The field would benefit in addressing its current and future issues if we could align our perspectives at least about past accomplishments even if we continue to disagree about current and future research priorities and strategy. This would not only nurture identity forming discussions about historical controversies but also facilitate boundary spanning for the following reasons. (1) Historical analyses lead to shared concepts, (2) a shared history makes communications easier across boundaries, (3) a shared history forms emotional bonds and commitments, and (4) historical awareness supports reflection and critical distance to the present helping to divorce discussions from personality conflicts and various forms of dogmatism. Our plea, therefore, is for the field to start a collective project of documenting its history from a multi-paradigm perspective. It is long overdue.

7. Conclusions: cross paradigm vs. within paradigm communication challenges In the past, holistic analyses of the IS field tended to focus either on a global classification of groups of variables (e.g. Ives et al. 1980) or on the division of multiple paradigms (Mumford, Hirschheim, Fitzgerald, & Wood-Harper 1985; Nissen, Klein, & Hirschheim 1991). In contrast, the perspective of the field developed here suggests a multi-level, horizontal stratification of the field’s structure with implications for its internal communication and knowledge creation patterns. The purpose of this last section is to outline some new disciplinary challenges that this shift in perspective implies for the field. Our analysis in Section 6 led us to conclude that attempting to build a single cumulative tradition would be a waste of resources, and perhaps even undesirable, because paradigmatic diversity is a source of growth and added insight into the complexity of the IS field. However, as paradigmatic communities split into ever more specialized CoP&K, communication difficulties within them keep growing. Most of us would agree that the proliferation of CoP&K makes it extremely difficult for any one person to acquire a comprehensive and representative understanding of the field, i.e. to know ‘what’s going on’. This is clearly reason for concern as it leads to duplication of past work and threatens to slow the rate of progress. The obvious countermeasures, namely engaging in metatheorizing and boundary spanning among multiple CoP&K is desirable and helpful as far as it exists. However, its impact tends to be felt only locally, affecting only a small subset of CoP&K within the same paradigm. A more fundamental strategy is necessary to improve communication among a substantial subset of CoP&K within each major paradigm. We propose that the researchers committed to the same paradigm should seek to develop a cumulative tradition combining the research interests from different CoP&K. This would naturally complement the activities to work on a shared sense of history at the highest level across differing paradigm constituencies. Some communities of practice comprise members committed to different paradigm communities. (An example is the SIG on Outsourcing as noted earlier.) In such a case, they would then simply contribute to different cumulative traditions while still maintaining a shared focus on closely related research objects and phenomena, namely those concerning outsourcing. Of course, we do not wish to imply that the idea of publishing larger digests of a wider spectrum of research within and across CoP&K is new. Yovitz’s Advances in Computers digests did exactly that in the field of Computer Science. In the field of Organizational Theory, the Handbook of Organizational Studies accomplishes this. Unfortunately, such publications are rare in the field of IS although recently there has been the emergence of the Advances in MIS Series edited by Zwass. More of these cross CoP&K surveys are needed.

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In scanning the broad spectrum of IS research, one simply cannot identify recent work that aims at summarizing a cumulative tradition for a broad segment of IS research. For some reason it seems as if the significance of such work for the future of the field has not been recognized yet. For example, we could not locate a current broad analysis of the accomplishments of positivist research in IS. The same is true for the interpretivist and critical paradigms even though their cumulative traditions are relatively young. This to us should be a priority for the field. We need broad digests that construct cumulative traditions across a range of CoP&K within paradigms. Whilst we could not find examples that explicitly set themselves this goal, the following come close for illustrating what we have in mind. For interpretive research, Walsham (1993) provides a cumulative review of the art and practice of interpretive IS research as it relates to organizations. In the related field of Management, Alvesson and Deetz (2000) do the same for the critical social research paradigm. Similarly, Hirschheim et al. (1996) might count as an attempt to compile the tradition of what was a major stream of critical social research in the mid 1990s (based on Habermas’ Critical Social Theory), but its scope was narrower than Alvesson and Deetz (2000). To sum up our rather long and detailed discussion of the implications of a Community of Practice Perspective for the IS field, we offer four main results of our analysis. The first sees the relationship between IS as a discipline and its practitioner constituencies as one of the most difficult disciplinary challenges to manage. (This point follows from the CoP&K differentiation between practice and academia that we tried to address with our PhD education recommendations in Section 5.) The second relates to the status of IS as a multiple paradigm discipline and calls for strengthening the visibility and impact of fundamental criticism (cf. Section 4). The third revolves around the need to identify the historical accomplishments of our discipline as a whole to improve our identity as well as the field’s academic discourse across the paradigmatic divisions by shared sense of the history of collective accomplishments (cf. Section 6). The fourth and last is to find ways to improve understanding and communication within each paradigm constituency across a broad subset of different CoP&K (cf. Section 7). While some of our conclusions may not be novel, our analysis has hopefully provided a new perspective on them. Finally, we wish to reflect on the issue raised in 2003 about a possible ‘‘Crisis in the IS Field?”(Hirschheim & Klein 2003). While much of the earlier analysis still rings true, the current analysis reinforces the question mark that we placed behind this question (see also our concerns about IS as an applied discipline in Klein & Hirschheim 2006). In our earlier publication we focused largely on the dangers of the field’s internal communication deficit perhaps under representing the field’s productive potential. We proposed a number of ways in which the field could overcome its internal communication deficits, and we believe these still remain valuable for harnessing the field’s productive potential. These were: (i) redirecting its research priorities to focus more on general theories; (ii) changing its institutional publication practices, (iii) focusing more on understanding the field’s organizational stakeholders, and (iv) developing new knowledge creation and transformation networks as a way of disseminating research results. These measures dovetail with the ones proposed here. However, the current paper added two important diagnostic tools to better understand the productive potential along with some risks inherent in the field’s current state of development. One is the recognition of the special characteristics of IS as a multiple paradigm science and the other, the importance of strengthening fundamental criticism. Both of these ideas add details to points (i), (ii) and (iv) as suggested in 2003. The results of this paper, therefore, have not only led to a partial revision of some of our earlier views (i.e. a much more positive view of the fruitfulness of internal divisions and frictions), but also the community CoP&K lens, provides a conceptual basis for future work that is both more concrete and intellectually penetrating. For us, the CoP&K perspective helps to concomitantly see and better appreciate the underlying conditions from where the IS disciplinary challenges have arisen, and to suggest new priorities and possible strategies for dealing with these challenges. References Ackoff, R. (1979). The future of operational research is past. Journal of the Operational Research Society, 30(2), 93–104. Ackoff, R. (1987). Presidents’ symposium: OR, a post mortem. Operations Research, 35(3), 471–474. Aldrich, H. (1999). Organizations evolving. CA: Sage Thousand Oaks.

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