25th Anniversary Edition

A t the Journal of Information Technology (JIT), we print an editorial only for special issues and special occasions. This issue sees the completion of our 25th full volume and as such we are treating it as cause for celebration – hence our silver anniversary cover. It is all too obvious that the world of information technology (IT), has been transformed since 1986. Indeed, the technology then was hardly pervasive – personal computers were in their infancy. While there were many predictions, nobody could say with confidence how the technology and its use in organisations and society would play out. E-mail was clunky, expert systems were attracting much attention and artificial intelligence was the sexy field in which to work. Nobody talked of knowledge management, business process re-engineering, websites or browsers, enterprise systems or social networking. Indeed, though outsourcing had existed since the very start of business computing, in 1986 the term had not yet entered common currency. So, the last 25 years have given those working in the field of information systems (IS) an enormously stimulating roller coaster ride. So, with the dominant issues in the field changing by the year it has been exhilarating but also very challenging to take the JIT on a journey to establish its identity and place among the leading journals in information systems. And just as the past has been unpredictable, the signs are that the future will not be easy either for academic journals or for the field of information systems. Time, then, to do some reflection. This issue aims to capture that unpredictability while this editorial takes some of the points in the articles and relates them to the journal’s aspirations for the future. While we may not be able to say precisely where we are going or where we will be 25 years from now, we know the compass by which we shall navigate. Starting, then, with this issue, we asked Allen Lee if he would, as a senior scholar, write both a retrospective and a prospective assessment of the information systems field. He has produced – Retrospect and Prospect: Information Systems Research in the Last and Next 25 Years. Here, he poses a challenge – that our development of knowledge should be more constructivist and design science oriented than at present but from within our typical locus in universities, viz in the business schools and commerce faculties. Unlike, say, organisational behaviour, the field has not been stable for long enough for all its knowledge to be built cumulatively by hypothetico-deductive research. But, this is a provocation to the established disciplines and also a challenge to the IS journals. Can we achieve and retain sufficient respectability in the eyes of our peers while operating under different epistemic norms? Allen Lee shows that taken-for-granted concepts such as ‘information’, ‘theory’, ‘system’, ‘organization’, and ‘relevance’ need to be rethought and poses the challenge that the future development of the IS field may be better modelled on the research disciplines found in the professions, including medicine, engineering, architecture, and law. His insights and provocations are commented upon and extended by four interlocutors. Writing as a declared IS ‘native’, Mats Lundeberg is sympathetic to Lee’s perspective and focuses on the ramifications for research approaches, in particular commenting on problematising ‘theories in use’ and ‘espoused theories’, balancing prescriptions and general direction, and working with different levels of abstraction. Richard Baskerville welcomes Lee’s revisiting of systems theory but also argues that, in Lee’s perspective, technology seems more conceptually separated from organisational systems than reality might allow, and invites a further extension of Lee’s concerns on ‘organization’. Baskerville also offers a nuanced deliberation on the role of theory in IS, and points to the challenges involved in the anxiety to ‘scienc-ify’ the IS field, and the gulf between what and how IS is researched, and how it is taught, agreeing the need to anchor future scientific studies to problems of practice, but by anchoring bridges on both sides of the gulf. In his response to Allen Lee’s paper, Robert Davison argues that in some respects the changes need to be more radical than Lee suggests, including in the way Ph.D. students are trained, in the selection criteria for new teachers, and how leading journals support different types of research. Davison goes on to argue that emerging markets, particularly India and China, may also change approaches and assumptions in the IS field, though he worries that at the moment, a Western intellectual hegemony is being perpetuated in these countries rather than being reshaped. He employs a number of insights into the culture and politics of the IS field to support this contention, and suggests more context-sensitive problem shaping and research is necessary, and more questioning of dogmatic beliefs and taken-for-granted assumptions that are rife in the IS field. Chrisanthi Avgerou extends Davison’s concerns by arguing for richness and diversity in the IS field. She questions Lee’s suggested programme, wondering about the validity of the detection of common theories-in-use for a few fundamental concepts across the whole IS field, and also wary of its consequences. She argues that, in fact, the coexistence of alternative theories for an observed phenomenon is the norm rather than the exception, both in the natural and the social sciences. Moreover, there are institutional obstacles to publishing some types of research, for example, well founded socio-theoretical research, and design research. These obstacles should not be misdiagnosed Journal of Information Technology (2010) 25, 333–335 & 2010 JIT Palgrave Macmillan All rights reserved 0268-3962/10