The art of vivacious variance

The novelist Vladimir Nabokov remarked that film adaptations of books should never be measured against the original book itself, but instead should be assessed on their own merits as vivacious variants of the original (Boyd, 2005). By this, I understand that while originals can achieve a standard of excellence, derivatives should not be assessed according to the same standards. The same message can apply to us, as we plan and undertake research. When standing on the shoulders of giants, we often adapt the work of others. At the textual level, this may involve paraphrasing; at the conceptual and theoretical levels, we expect to see extensions, validations, or refutations of prior work. Vivacious adaptations may resolve existing issues in the field, offer more practical ways of understanding IS phenomena that subsequent researchers can explore, and tease out significant nuances that explain a situation or reposition an entire body of work in what amounts to a paradigm shift (Kuhn, 1962). If new contributions to knowledge are to become renowned in their own right, researchers need to do more than concoct some minor tweak to the original: they need to inject a spirit of vivacity to their research design and reporting. In this way, the new research contribution may vary significantly from the original on which it builds. For example, researchers who confront anomalies that can only be resolved by challenging the commonly held epistemological and ontological assumptions of the current paradigm, proposing entirely new ways of investigating phenomena, may be well positioned to make contributions that shift the status quo in a significant way (cf Kuhn, 1962), like a breath of fresh, cool air that enters a room through a long‐shut window and disperses the hot and foetid atmosphere within (Boyd, 2005). Vivacious variance is particularly feasible in theory development. A notable example is the way Giddens' (1984) theory of structuration in organizations has been adapted by DeSanctis and Poole (1994) to consider to what extent the “spirit” of technology is reflected in its use and byOrlikowski (1992, 2000) in her critiques of the duality of structure to technology. Such innovative research is often subjected to particularly harsh questioning by reviewers, especially those with vested interests or axes to grind, for whom the new vivacious ideas are incompatible with their current beliefs, so it is important that editors select review teams with care to ensure that fair and transparent reviews emerge. Further, researchers who introduce ideas from reference disciplines uncommonly associated with the “home” discipline (Tarafdar & Davison, 2018), Information Systems in our case, may find that they have a struggle to create a convincing argument that meets reviewer/reader expectations. This may be more pronounced where interdisciplinary contributions are made at the intersection of two or more existing disciplines. For instance, theories such as Punctuated Equilibrium Theory, originally developed in Evolutionary Biology (Eldredge & Gould, 1972), and Shifting Baseline Theory, originally developed in Fishery Science (Pauly, 1995), may offer perspectives so novel to IS researchers as to be catachrestical. When disciplines “collide and intermingle” (Tarafdar & Davison, 2018) in this way, radical new theoretical perspectives may emerge that become targets for considerable suspicion by sceptical reviewers if they regard the research as not contributing to the discipline that the journal in question publishes (Mansilla, 2006). Reviewing vivacious articles thus requires a spirit of vivacity. Naturally, not all researchers will rise to this challenge, and much decent work (normal science) that is relevant and rigorous yet that does not aspire to the refined standard of vivacity (model revolution and paradigm change) will continue to be undertaken and published. Pagel's (2012) remarks about the value of copying as a survival technique are well taken: Within the IS domain, the propensity to copy certain research models with minimal variance is well known and such research continues to be submitted to this journal. That said, it appears that reviewer expectations