The Espoused Theories of IS: A Study of General Editorial Statements

In the IS field there has been the ongoing debate about a potential identity crisis, which has led researchers to study the output of the community in order to evaluate where IS research currently is and where it could potentially be. This has resulted in various proposals for IS research ‘in practice’. This research follows a different strategy and studies what IS research is claimed to be (the espoused theories of IS). The section of IS journals’ General Editorials Statements (GES), that is, the informative section offered by most journals where they position themselves with regard to potential authors, already contains the answer. Basing our study on the AISWorld journal ranking, we collected GES for a sample of 30 IS journals for the years 1997 and 2007. We applied thematic, lexicometric, and factor analyses to the datasets of the 1997 and the 2007 GES. The results of the analyses show how the institutionalized discourse about IS research has changed over the last decade.