A Re-Examination of Banville and Landry's "Can the Field of MIS be Disciplined?"

This paper takes on a contrarian view of Banville and Landry’s (1989) landmark article “Can the Field of MIS Be Disciplined?” Notwithstanding its valuable contribution to the discussion concerning the progress of the IS field and its considerable influence on IS research, the article’s interpretations of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and proposed model for the IS field have not been critically analyzed. Inspired by Richard Whitley’s (1984) The Intellectual and Social Organization of the Sciences, the landmark article argues that Kuhn’s model for scientific progress is vague, rigid, totalitarian, monistic and therefore unsuitable for a multidisciplinary field like IS. A critical analysis of the article’s claims and arguments finds several uses of rhetorical devices in their interpretation of Kuhn’s model which prevent the IS community from taking advantage of the paradigm concept and engaging its multidisciplinary roots. Practical implications for a more disciplinary IS future are proposed.