Abstract

This article traces the evolution of the information systems (IS) discipline in Sweden from the establishment of the first professorial chair in 1967 to the present. We combine a historical reconstruction with a bibliometric analysis of 208 publications in the Association for Information Systems (AIS) Senior Scholars’ List of Premier Journals. The analysis identifies four phases: the Langefors era, the shift toward technology use, institutionalization and globalization, and renewed societal relevance. The early Langefors era was comparatively coherent around systems development; the “everything counts” condition emerged more specifically during the subsequent pluralization of technology-use research. Interpreting the trajectory through path creation, path destruction, and a field-level policy of truth, we show how inherited socio-technical repertoires generate variation, national and cross-university institutions reproduce a community, and evaluative infrastructures stabilize selected forms of legitimacy. Such infrastructures can strengthen international visibility and coordination while producing exclusions that create new path-destruction pressures. We contribute a “push from the edges” process model in which peripheral communities renew a mature field by recombining inherited repertoires, building coordinating institutions, and revising evaluative criteria so that insights from the periphery can reshape the center

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