Desperately Seeking Information in Information Systems Research

The information systems (IS) research community has long engaged in dialogue as to the core of IS and the discipline’s legitimacy within business schools. Our concern is that efforts to protect the discipline by theorizing the IT artifact may have diverted attention from conceptualizing information as the dependent variable, through which we assess the effectiveness of our true core subject matter—information systems. To evaluate this supposition, this study employs a text-mining software, Leximancer v.4, to analyze the content of editorials published in AIS “basket of six” journals between 2002 and 2014. Preliminary results hint at subtle changes in themes, as well as the meaning and relevance of “information” over time. Once analysis is complete, we will draw on the findings to suggest potential opportunities and directions for IS research that treat information (the end) as seriously as its means (the IT artifact).