Learning from MIS-ventures: MIS Research as a Narrative Web

It is acknowledged that MIS knowledge has always resided in conceptualizing and developing applications in the context of ‘explicit’ and well defined knowledge. In this paper, however, we contend that the less tangible aspect of knowledge, ‘tacit’ knowledge, is now the area that demands more attention from MIS researchers and academics. Tacit knowledge provides the organizational context for MIS implementation. MIS researchers need to recognize practitioners’ skills in utilizing tacit knowledge in their organizational workplace if they are to successfully contextualize the explicit and tacit knowledge that is inherent in practitioner technical know-how. The historical narrative of the MIS discipline, as told by our published academic papers, lacks the tacit knowledge that intensive research could reveal. It particularly lacks the tacit knowledge that stories of mis-takes and mis-adventures could provide. In order to support our claim, we inspected three influential, highly ranked journals over a 5-year period. The results of our analysis reveal a lack of balance in the worldview of MIS academics. Most articles are premised on positive outcomes and utopian stories of success. Introduction The aim of this paper is to explore whether the management information systems (MIS) academic literature adequately analyses and reports upon the complex nature of knowledge acquisition and learning. Our particular epistemological perspective is based in narratology, for we posit that many tacit aspects of knowledge are best represented in the capture, re-telling and interpretation of narratives. Furthermore, when we read the extant body of our own MIS theory as a complex web of narrative, then we discover that it is an incomplete narrative: as we read it our theory is the construct of positivists who promote ever newer and better ways of operationalizing the explicit knowledge that emerges from positivist explorations, while discarding the