Seizing the Opportunity: Towards a Historiography of Information Systems
Historical perspectives are only timidly entering the world of IS research compared to historical research in management or organization studies. If major IS outlets have already published history-oriented papers, the number of historical papers - although increasing - remains low. We carried out a thematic analysis of all papers on History and IS published between 1972 and 2009 indexed on ABI and papers indexed in Google ScholarTM for the same period. We used a typology developed by theorists Usdiken and Kieser (2004) who classify historical organisation research into supplementarist, integrationist and reorientationist approaches. We outline their links with the epistemological stances well known in IS research, positivism, interpretivism and critical research; we then focus on their differences and historiographical characteristics. We found that most IS History papers are supplementarist descriptive case studies with limited uses of History. This paper then suggests that IS research could benefit from adopting integrationist and reorientationist historical perspectives and we offer some examples to illustrate how that would contribute to enriching, extending and challenging existing theories.
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| Length: | |
| Date of creation: | 2012 |
| Date of revision: | |
| Publication status: | Published, Journal of Information Technology, 2012, 1-15 |
| Handle: | RePEc:hal:journl:halshs-00671690 |
| Note: | View the original document on HAL open archive server: http://halshs.archives-ouvertes.fr/halshs-00671690 |
| Contact details of provider: | Web page: http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/
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References listed on IDEAS
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- Page, Scott E., 2006. "Path Dependence," Quarterly Journal of Political Science, now publishers, vol. 1(1), pages 87-115, January.
- Peter Clark & Michael Rowlinson, 2004. "The Treatment of History in Organisation Studies: Towards an 'Historic Turn'?," Business History, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 46(3), pages 331-352.
- Chris Caswill & Robin Wensley, 2007. "Doors and boundaries: A recent history of the relationship between research and practice in UK organizational and management research," Business History, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 49(3), pages 293-320.
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