Shifting baselines in information systems research threaten our future relevance

In 2013, the AIS appointed its first historian. The rationale was that the IS (or MIS) discipline, now with more than 50 years of history, would benefit from a collective effort to preserve and interpret its history with a view to strengthen and further its theoretical genealogy (Zhang, 2015). It is ironic that, co‐existing with this view, we are beginning to find forthcoming from a number of IS scholars, research that suffers from three clear and present dangers: weak theoretical motivation from an IS perspective; lack of novel theoretical understanding of an IS problem or phenomenon; and atheoretical analysis that does not consider or fails to build on cumulative bases in IS. In combination, these dangers pose a significant, even existential threat to the long‐term health and relevance of the discipline. In this editorial, we explore the manifestation of these dangers, identify the risks that they bring, and consider how they can be tackled. Firstly, weak IS motivation implies that research questions do not address phenomena relating to the design or implementation or use of an IS. Such research questions often involve the unthinking importation of ideas from another discipline, without relating them to the specifics of the above. For example, consider a research question that analyses the relationship between the extent of smartphone use and sleep patterns. There is no sociotechnical system present in such a research question: The smartphone, in the absence of any specific app, app settings, user, process of use, purpose, context, etc., does not qualify as such a system. Secondly, we see studies that lack novel theoretical understanding. This means that while a studymay examine patterns of inference, it does not situate them in a conceptual stream of knowledge in the IS discipline. Continuing the “smartphone and sleep” example above, the understanding generated is unlikely to make any significant contribution to the IS discipline, given the absence of a sociotechnical IS, though it may make a contribution to sleep science. Thirdly, we are seeing research that suffers from atheoretical data analysis. In other words, researchers search for patterns without an adequate understanding of the phenomenon. The incidence of these problems, while not entirely new, has now been exacerbated in part due to the analysis of huge data sets that are culled or scraped from various websites and archives. The ready availability of such data sets makes this a particularly enticing endeavour and is complemented by a plethora of tools that appear to ensure rigor; however, researchers' focus tends to be more on the supposed rigor than on the presence of an IS phenomenon, let alone an interesting or relevant one. Meanwhile, because papers that involve such analysis are often incomprehensible to anyone not specializing in such analysis, the broader consumability of the research (Robey & Markus, 1998) is forsaken. There are three grave risks associated with these three problems. The first is a lack of cumulative theoretical contribution to the IS discipline. If research published in IS journals is poorly motivated from an IS point of view, or if the motivation has little to do with the design, implementation and value of an IS, then the IS components will be whittled down to single instances of IT, such as a device (e.g. smartphone or PC) or an application (e.g. Facebook), without the sociotechnical aspects that form the core around which their design, use and management plays out. The IS contributions, both theoretical and practical, will become ever more tenuous. If we do not develop novel theoretical understandings, our contribution to knowledge, essential for any discipline, will diminish. The second risk is that IS research will not matter to anyone because IS may cease to exist: it will be swallowed up by all the business functions