Getting Boundary Conditions Right: Towards a Classification of the Information Economy Sectors

Abstract

Just as most people are not WEIRD (Henrich et al. 2010), the assumption of industry uniformity may not be true in all cases. Several reviews showed that IS research does not take industry seriously enough. Neglecting industry context can have a severe effect on research results by underspecifying theory or by leading to general explanations that do not hold in other contexts. This paper examines the so called “Information Economy”, an industrial context comprising of the ICT, Content and Media, and Internet sectors. We analyze a unique, very large data set that contains employee mobility data of 27,387 organizations. We derive some interesting descriptive statistics that help to differentiate the Information Economy sectors. In addition, with the application of a clustering algorithm, we derive industrial clusters on our data. Our analysis reveals that the OECD’s conceptualization of the Information Economy reaches its limits when it comes to more granular sub-sectors within the industry, at which point it no longer seems appropriate from a social/cultural industry perspective. Our study contributes to ongoing discussions around generalizability and boundaries of research results, as well as to the still small body of industry research in the IS field. These findings have importantimplications for future research and practice.