An Examination of the Strategic Alignment Literature in IS through a Co-Citation Analysis

In this article we study the diffusion of Henderson and Venkatraman's strategic alignment model (SAM) through the analysis of their 1993 seminal article's legacy. We investigate all works that cite this article and show that this corpus constitutes a homogeneous research field that does not question the basic assumptions of the original model. We investigate the intellectual structure of this field. Using different techniques of data analysis such as author co-citation analysis, multidimensional scaling and factor analysis, we confirm the existence of this field of research and delineate different theoretical pillars, i.e. the hypotheses and premises of this field. Despite a first movement of dissociation between SAM and its theoretical origins, the intellectual structure of the field reinforces the original hypotheses and premises. This field mostly does not challenge SAM's fundamental assumptions although these assumptions may artificially constrain organizational reality and take into account a very limited aspect of it. We conclude by an appeal to reconsider SAM through other possible alternative perspectives and assumptions. This might well lead to an improvement of IT projects' success rate in organizations.