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Seizing the opportunity: towards a historiography of information systems

  • Research Article
  • Published:
Journal of Information Technology

Abstract

Historical perspectives are only timidly entering the world of IS research compared to historical research in management or organisation 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 Scholar™ for the same period. We used a typology developed by theorists Üsdiken and Kieser, 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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Notes

  1. To improve understanding we use the traditional distinction between ‘history’ (the past) and History (historical science).

  2. For broader discussions about historical approaches in management and organisation studies, see a new journal set up in 2006: Management & Organization History (http://moh.sagepub.com/). This unique journal corresponds to a community of organisational historians which departs from the business history community, through its focus on ‘the study of management, organizations and organizing’. It is related to a regular track at the European Group in Organizations Studies (EGOS) conference about ‘historical perspectives in organizations studies’ (see http://www.egos2012.net/2011/06/sub-theme-08-swg-historical-perspectives-in-organization-studies/).

  3. Scientism refers to a belief in the universal applicability of the systematic methods and approach of science, especially the view that empirical science constitutes the most authoritative worldview or most valuable part of human learning, to the exclusion of other viewpoints.

  4. Booth and Rowlinson use the metaphors of the ‘Flintstone method’ and the ‘Simpsons method’ to describe these two situations.

  5. Books are clearly a better example of historical research and there are a few in IS. However, the pressures on researchers to publish in journals have grown enormously and there are hardly any rewards in publishing research monographs, particularly in business schools. This is another debate.

  6. Based on the same search terms as for ABI, see Appendix C.

  7. Beyond the references mentioned in this paper, see also Bannister's website for an inventory of IS historical literature: http://is2.lse.ac.uk/leo/historio.htm.

  8. Synchronic analysis views phenomena only at one point in time, usually the present; a diachronic analysis regards a phenomenon in terms of developments through time.

  9. This is a good example of what we meant earlier by historiography as the History of History.

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Appendices

Appendix A

Results of ABI thematic coding per year and per decade

Request: ‘information systems’+‘history’

Target: citation and abstract. Focused on academic (i.e. peer-reviewed) journals and those with full text version (which allowed a real exploration of abstracts and if necessary to confirm classification, the full text).

Period: 1972–2009.

Results: 384 papers, among which 64 with a non-anecdotal use of the notion of history, and 31 published in IS journals.

NB: we chose to target citation and abstract to increase the likelihood to get real History-oriented papers, and not incidental uses of the notion of history. We defined a journal as an IS journal if present in the IS world ranking.

(see: http://ais.affiniscape.com/displaycommon.cfm?an=1&subarticlenbr=432)

Evolution per year (See Figure A1; Table A1)

Table A1 Evolution per decade
Figure A1
figure 2

Evolution of IS historical papers per year

Appendix B

Distribution of historical stance (supplementarist, integrationist or reorientationist) in IS papers published in academic journals overall and in IS journals in particular (See Figure B1).

Figure B1
figure 3

(1) Distribution of supplementarist, integrationist and reorientationist papers and (2) Distribution of supplementarist, integrationist and reorientationist papers in IS journals.

Appendix C

Coding of a selection of historical papers (from ABI)

Classification scheme applied for our coding: NR, S, I or R

NR: Not Relevant, rejected. Only incidental use of historical approaches. The word ‘history’ is used in the paper, but only incidentally.

S: Supplementarist. A historical perspective is claimed. But it is only a case narrative or the use of long-term data without any specific conceptualisation. Historical material is not used to produce a specific theorisation. Nor do authors use historical concepts or methods.

I: Integrationist. Historical material is used to produce a specific theorisation. Alternatively, authors use historical concepts or methods. This is done so as to extend current theories.

R: Re-orientationist. Historical material is used to produce a specific theorisation. Alternatively, authors use historical concepts or methods. This is not done to extend current theories. It is done to develop specific theorisations about historical perspectives on IS (See Table C1).

Table C1 Extract of the thematic coding (full list of 54 pages is available upon request)

Appendix D

Google scholar search results

For the query: history+‘information systems’, only in the title

Period: 1972–2009

Number of results: 190 (See Figure D1)

Figure D1
figure 4

Evolution of IS historical publication (for Google Scholar).

illustration

figure b

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figure a

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Mitev, N., De Vaujany, FX. Seizing the opportunity: towards a historiography of information systems. J Inf Technol 27, 110–124 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2012.1

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