Debating Genres and IS Research: The Case of Action Principles for Service Automation

Information systems (IS) is a peculiar hybrid wanting often to define itself as a discipline, though it has assembled itself as something that could more persuasively be called a field. It is shot through with ‘discipline anxiety’—the kind of thing, for example, social sciences display toward natural sciences, economics toward mathematics, and management toward economics and quantitative methods. Part of this discipline anxiety has been to keep returning to a rigor versus relevance debate, as if both rigor AND relevance were not critical to the study of an applied, fast-changing study area, driven by emerging technologies, the exponential data explosion, and related phenomena.