What Makes IT Professionals Special?

Abstract

Research on the IT workforce has played an important role in IS research for the past 40 years. An essential part of IT workforce research deals with the contextualization of theories. Models and theories are adapted to the IT environment by integrating context-specific factors to explicitly account for relevant IT-specific conditions. Our literature review addresses context-specific theorizing in IT workforce research to understand IT-specific contextual factors. By analyzing papers dealing with IT workforce related topics published in the Senior Scholars' Basket of Journals and in selected additional journals, we examine the process of contextualization in two ways. First, we synthesize predominant IT-specific contextual factors for IT workforce research. Second, we investigate approaches of contextualization in IT workforce literature. We present nine IT-specific contextual factors grouped by three perspectives. Additionally, we introduce two approaches for contextualization in the IT workforce research and give recommendations for context-specific theorizing. Our literature review contributes to a better understanding of the uniqueness of IT professionals by providing information about how context-specific theorizing is being considered in IT workforce research.