Author ORCID Identifier
Wenshin Chen: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1583-5855
Abstract
While prior reviews have periodically examined the field’s progress, they never articulate epistemological preferences by nations and institutions and typically only highlight North American and European differences. Given rapid changes in the IT world and global expansion of our research community recently, the existing knowledge will not be sufficient to comprehend the field’s contemporary development. The purpose of this study is thus to reexamine prior perceptions of paradigmatic progress by articulating the epistemological stances by nations and institutions in the IS field. Upon reviewing papers published in eight premier journals from 2005 to 2020, I categorized various epistemological orientations by nations and institutions and identified a visible divide that separated epistemological mentality of North America, Continental Europe, and Asia from that of British Isles, Oceania, and Scandinavia. While positivist research continued to dominate the field, it was most prevalent not in North America, as traditionally perceived, but in Asia. Drawing on a dialectic pluralist perspective, I contend that there is a critical need to increase the field’s academic diversity. Research implications, especially on how to bridge the emerging continental divide and enriching the field’s research diversity, are discussed.
Recommended Citation
Chen, W. (In press). On the Epistemological Progress by Nations and Institutions and the Emerging Continental Divide: A Dialectic Pluralist Perspective. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 56, pp-pp. Retrieved from https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/vol56/iss1/8
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