Absent information technology in legitimate information systems research

Abstract

The current identity of the information systems (IS) discipline, to certain extent, relies on the presence of information technology. The urgent call to theorizing IT artifacts made by previous IS studies raises concerns on the roles and importance of IT artifacts in the wide range of topics investigated by IS scholars, especially in the studies in which IT artifacts are considered absent. We analyze the topics, IT artifacts, and contexts of these studies from the 2009 and 2010 ICIS proceedings to address this concern. We find that IT professions and IT artifacts are significant contextual factors that cannot be ignored in these studies. This helps the IS discipline to rethink the establishment of its intellectual identity solely on the premise of theorizing IT artifacts.