Do we care about the Societal Impact of our research?

Abstract

The nature of “societal impact”, and the extent to which our research has any, is loaded with potential dissent. However, this is not a topic that we can avoid much longer. Research evaluation exercises, as conducted by funding bodies, are sharpening their expectations that our research should have demonstrable impact in the form of societal value. For instance, the Hong Kong Government's Research Grants Council, in its guidance notes 1 for the 2020 Research Assessment Exercise, specifies that 15% of research assessment will be attributed to impact. Impact is defined as “the demonstrable contributions, beneficial effects, valuable changes, or advantages that research qualitatively brings to the economy, society, culture, public policy or services, health, the environment or quality of life; and that are beyond the academia.” Clearly, research funding agencies will no longer be satisfied with claims that our research has impact merely because we use it in training of our students, because it is well-cited by other academics, or because it is published in reputable journals. One reason is that these journals are themselves accorded credibility by virtue of their impact factors or inclusion in indexes of journal quality such as, in our own field, the AIS Senior Scholar basket of eight journals, as well as the UT Dallas and FT50 lists of top business journals. Instead, funding bodies will seek to identify how our research contributes to measurable impacts for non-academic stakeholders in industry, government, and society at large. Such demands seem to be justified in situations where the source of university funding is the public purse. In these situations, it seems reasonable that at least some discernible societal value should emerge from research. In addition, to ensure our accountability, it is probably necessary to evaluate it in some way. However, such demands may well be unwelcome for academics accustomed to playing the H-index game, viz.: the writing of peer-reviewed journal papers (the more the merrier) that are cited exclusively by other academics, in pursuit of ever-higher numbers of publication counts and H-index citation scores. The visibility of this game is all too clear on Google Scholar, which is increasingly used as a source for ranking academics: see for instance the University of Arizona's H index of IS scholars. 2 Another more select publication game (drawing on SCI/SSCI data) can also be undertaken: see for instance the AIS's indices of IS scholars. 3 Given the new focus on evaluating impact directly, it is apparent that funding agencies are increasingly sceptical of the academic claims of a strong relationship between the number of citations and the extent of societal impact. Research that fuels these claims could run the risk of being seen as self-serving in its pursuit of behaviour that is fundamentally unethical. The journals themselves, proud of their impact factors, will also come in for the criticism that they have helped to foster the same skewed climate where societal impact is neglected. Accordingly, there is likely to be increased societal pressure for a new research evaluation regime. How impact in different scientific fields can be measured will vary significantly, and it is proposed that each discipline (like IS in schools of business or information science) should define its detailed measurements in the form of “strong” cases. Service to society. Development of knowledge that benefits business and the broader society, locally and globally, for the ultimate purpose of creating a better world. Stakeholder involvement. Research that engages different stakeholders in the research process, without compromising the independence of inquiry. Impact on stakeholders. Research that has an impact on diverse stakeholders, especially research that contributes to better business and a better world. Valuing both basic and applied contributions. Contributions in both the theoretical domain to create fundamental knowledge and in applied domains to address pressing and current issues. Valuing plurality and multidisciplinary collaboration. Diversity in research themes, methods, forms of scholarship, types of inquiry, and interdisciplinary collaboration to reflect the plurality and complexity of business and societal problems. Sound methodology. Research that implements sound scientific methods and processes in both quantitative and qualitative or both theoretical and empirical domains. Broad dissemination. Diverse forms of knowledge dissemination that collectively advance basic knowledge and practice”. 13 Research that aims to create significant impacts for non-academic stakeholders is of course published, though it may not always be very visible in the academic journals. Some examples appeared in an MISQ special issue on ICTs and societal challenges (Majchrzak, Markus, & Wareham, 2016), eg, Díaz Andrade and Doolin (2016), while others have appeared sporadically in this journal, eg, Tim, Pan, Ractham, and Kaewkitipong (2017) and Zheng and Yu (2016). Recognising the value of this kind of research, the ISJ has an open call for papers 14 targeting responsible IS research that contributes to a better world. More generally, it is imperative that we take the ideas espoused by Galletta et al. (2019) further. As a research community, we must encourage changes in our research culture in order to shift the baseline values away from just counting publications and citations. We need to find an effective (and cost-efficient) way of encouraging and evaluating a stronger societal impact value orientation. Only when that is achieved can we expect IS research to contribute substantially to solving societal and environmental challenges. We are grateful to Maris G Martinsons for comments received on this editorial. In this issue of the Information Systems Journal, we present five papers. In the first paper, Shirin Madon and C.R. Ranjini (2019) report on initiatives taken by the state Government of Karnataka, India, to pioneer a rural Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) policy by funding entrepreneurs to set up operations in rural areas and provide employment to disadvantaged youth. This was an exemplary policy, given its focus on rural outreach and bridging the digital divide. However, out of the 31 companies that applied for the program, less than one third of the bigger players commenced operations while many smaller players who had received the initial funding could not sustain their operations. Madon and Ranjini undertook a 6-year longitudinal study of three rural BPOs in Karnataka to see what lessons can be learnt. Although the scheme was well-conceived, state support for rural entrepreneurs was inadequate for smaller players to survive and insufficient attention was paid to ameliorating the rural infrastructure within which impact sourcing activity was being implemented. In the second paper, Tabitha James, Jason Deane, and Linda Wallace (2019) draw from goal-content theory to examine how exercise goals are associated with the use of fitness technology features and how this use is associated with well-being. The results reveal that exercisers who have enjoyment and competence goals are more likely to use the data management features. Exercisers whose goals are to improve their appearance or fitness are also more likely to use the data management features but less likely to use the features that enable social interaction. Exercisers who have a goal to increase social contact are more likely to use both the social interaction features and the features intended to control their exercise. Use of the social interaction features is positively associated with exercisers' well-being. The findings illustrate that individuals who have different exercise goals use different features of the fitness technologies; meanwhile, which features they use can impact the well-being benefits they obtain. In the third paper, David Hull, Paul Lowry, James Gaskin, and Kristijan Mirkovski (2019) provide a roadmap for research that would inform the design of immersive artefacts and activities within the problem-based learning delivery of information systems management education. They reason that homework materials that are designed as immersive stories have the potential to catalyse the subsequent activities of team-based learning and self-regulated learning. They further reason that storytelling as a cognitive device can and should be updated for the age of multimedia learning. They provide guidance for the evidence-based design of multimedia instructional artefacts and provide access to online examples. In the fourth paper, David Muringi, Martin Wiener, and Marco Marabelli (2019) address IS project control from a new angle, focusing on the socioemotional dynamics of control activities, and in particular, the linkage between controllers' control styles and controlees' emotions and subsequent behaviours. They draw on longitudinal fieldwork that was conducted within the context of a large-scale, healthcare IS project. Their study shows that although controlees' negative emotional appraisals of control activities do not necessarily translate into immediate resistance behaviours, they can nevertheless adversely impact long-term control effectiveness by giving rise to delayed resistance behaviours that are triggered by shifting control styles. By highlighting the significance of socioemotional dynamics to the effective control of IS projects, their findings are important for IS project control theory, as well as immediately useful for managers. In the fifth paper, Christoph Mittendorff, Nicholas Berente, and Roland Holten (2019) explore the sharing economy from the perspective of millenials. They report on a study of 1047 millennials and find that trust has more of an impact on their willingness to engage in sharing encounters that have a longer duration, require a greater financial investment and involve more social interaction. They also note that although all sharing encounters take place through two-sided intermediary platforms, the role of trust among the different types of sharing partners is not symmetrical across the two sides. For instance, trust in the intermediary platform matters more to customers than to service providers in their willingness to engage in service encounters.