Sympathy or strategy: social capital drivers for collaborative contributions to the IS community

Abstract

Despite growing interest in delineating the social identity of Information Systems (IS) research and the network structures of its scholarly community, little is known about how the IS community network is shaped by individual conceptions and what motivates IS researchers to engage in research collaboration. Using an exploratory theoretical framework that is based on three dimensions of social capital theory, we examined 32 years of scientific co-authorship in an international IS researcher community. We formulated propositions to empirically examine the multi-level relationships between personal drivers and the resulting complex network organization of the IS community. Our propositions are refined with qualitative interviews and tested using a survey. This process revealed a collaborative research culture with several individual dispositions, including a strategic structural focus, a cognitive focus and a relational focus. These exist among actors displaying a range of differing behaviours such as active engagement and passive serendipity. Our study indicates individual differences at the conception stage of engaging in academic collaboration impact on the resulting network-level configuration. We identified that regional preference, maturity life cycles and lack of smallworld properties highlight the important role of senior members as structural backbones and brokers within the IS community.

Knowledge Networks of the Information Technology Management Domain: A Social Network Analysis Approach

“…We found the network did not contain one large core community of authors unlike the other information systems communities whose co-authorship networks are dominated by a core component (Trier & Molka-Danielsen, 2013;Vidgen et al, 2007;Xu & Chau, 2006). We found that the diameter of the co-authorship network was relatively small and that the clustering co-efficient was high.…”

“…For example, Vidgen et al (2007) used the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) and measured this community's network properties using a range of centrality measures for individual authors including degree, betweenness, closeness, eigenvector, flow betweenness, and structural holes. Meanwhile, Trier and Molka-Danielsen (2013) examined the IRIS community network and how individual conceptions shape it using a similar range of centrality measures to that of Vidgen et al (2007), Swar and Khan (2013), and Cucchi and Fuhrer (2007). Similarly, Xu and Chau (2006) …”

“…Previous studies that took a network perspective on the IS research domain such as Xu and Chau (2006), Vidgen, et al, (2007), and Trier and Molka-Danielsen (2013) predominantly investigate knowledge domains' core network-level properties (such as components, diameter, density, the clustering co-efficient, and average degree) and the node-level properties (degree, betweenness, eigenvector, centralities, structural holes and hubs). These properties can provide a good understanding of both the network as a whole and the network at the specific node level; thus, we also report these properties.…”

“…Third, we compared the ITM network with other IS allied community networks reported in the literature, such as electronic government (e-government) (Khan & Park, 2013), IT outsourcing (Swar & Khan, 2013), the ICIS (Xu & Chau, 2006), ECIS (Vidgen, et al, 2007), and IRIS (Trier & Molka-Danielsen, 2013) (see Table 10). Table 10 shows that the network structure of the ITM network is structurally similar to the egovernment, IT outsourcing, and ICIS networks, which are small world networks (Xu & Chau, 2006;Khan & Park, 2013;Swar & Khan, 2013) (a small network is one in which there is a low level of separation among the nodes).…”

“…SNA is a structured way of analyzing relationships in groups by providing a rich and systematic means of assessing informal networks by mapping and analyzing relationships among entities, including people, teams, departments, or even entire organizations (Cross, Parker, Prusak, & Borgatti, 2001). Researchers have used the SNA technique to analyze and map knowledge networks formed by information system (IS) and its allied research communities, including electronic government communities (Khan & Park, 2013), information technology (IT) outsourcing communities (Swar & Khan, 2013), the social media-based systems research domain (Khan, 2013), information and communications technology research communities that focus on developing countries (Swar & Khan, 2014), the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) community (Xu & Chau, 2006), and the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) (Vidgen, Henneberg, & Naude, 2007) and Researchers Seminar in Scandinavia (IRIS) communities (Trier & Molka-Danielsen, 2013). …”