Impact and implications for practice

Abstract

In an earlier editorial in this journal (Chatterjee & Davison, 2021), we argued that authors should strengthen their positioning and motivation for undertaking their research. As we noted, 'the positioning and motivation of the paper strongly determine how the contribution emerges in the latter half of the paper'. More specifically, we recommended that authors motivate their research through problematisation , including, inter alia, both an identification of the stakeholders most likely to find the research value and then a focus on these same stakeholders via an appropriate set of research questions and objectives.Problematising the research in this way requires the researcher to reflect on why the research is being undertaken, and which stakeholders' perspectives are privileged or excluded.Notwithstanding the advantages of a problematisation approach to research motivation, we note that the vast majority of information systems research is motivated and positioned as being of value to corporate stakeholders, often paraphrased by authors in their research contributions as 'managers'. Clarke and Davison (2020) reviewed approximately 20% of the empirical research (659 articles) published over a 15-year period in the eight AIS basket journals. They found that over 90% of the articles in their sample privilege the interests of corporate stakeholders, and indeed 90% also only consider economic interests, though of a range of stakeholders. Less than 10% of the articles examine issues that are of interest to non-corporate stakeholders, and similarly less than 10% consider social interests (whether of organisations or people). Environmental interests, that is, the implications of the research for natural ecosystems and the environment more broadly, are essentially unrepresented in the sample.Problematising research will at least help to ensure that the stakeholders most likely to be interested in the research will be identified, but if the pattern observed by Clarke and Davison (2020) continues, we can expect that over 90% of those stakeholders will be at the corporate level, whether the near-ubiquitous managers or the organisation as an entity in its own right. Further, we can also expect that research will predominantly consider economic interests, for example, profit, effectiveness and efficiency, but not non-economic interests such as social and environmental. Where the communication of research findings is concerned, researchers are often experts at crafting implications for other researchers but are much less adept where non-academic audiences are concerned. These latter contributions range from the formulaic (e.g., managers should invest in employee training) to the implausible (e.g., managers should redesign their corporate systems), and are sometimes so whimsical (e.g., managers globally will find our experimental results based on a student population to be of intrinsic value) that their inclusion seems to be no more than meeting a journal requirement. Thus, not only are limitations limited (Davison, 2017) but s...

Addressing the information needs of informal carers in Malawi: a healthcare intervention based on co-creation

“…We identified participants both for the focus groups and the workshop based on considerations of who the stakeholders of our project might be, who might be interested in its outcomes and who could possibly be affected by these, directly or indirectly. In other words, we carefully considered and problematised our research work in a way that its results could be relevant, desirable and beneficial to our specific stakeholders (Davison, 2023).…”

“…In other words, we carefully considered and problematised our research work in a way that its results could be relevant, desirable and beneficial to our specific stakeholders (Davison, 2023).…”

From Groups to Communities: A Resource Mobilization Theory Perspective on the Emergence of Communities

“…In doing so, we use the academic outputs of consumer identity researchers (CIR) and incorporate novel computational approaches such as Topic Modelling (TM), Network Analysis (NA), and Community Detection (CD) on a corpus of academic outputs to trace resources across groups. Such an approach allowed us access to a wealth of data often missing in prior research on communities, while the novel context of our study contributes to better understandings, without negating the generalizability of insights for both research (Struijk et al, 2022) and practice (Davison, 2022).…”

“…Four key implications for the broader IS theory and practice (e.g., Davison, 2022;Struijk et al, 2022) stem from understanding the emergence of communities. Regarding the practical implications of our work, we demonstrate that practitioners who wish to create new communities should aim to unite existing groups.…”

The practitioner perspective

“…In line with previous ISJ editorials (Davison, 2023;Díaz Andrade et al, 2019), we are interested in learning what works and what kind of impact can be achieved, at both the local and the global scale. Thus, a study undertaken in South Africa needs to be situated in the South African context, to refer to the unique features of that context and how they inform the study, to surface insights from that context, and to provide actionable recommendations that will be relevant in the South African context.…”