My intellectual background is therefore very American.  And because of my very American orientation, I do not see myself as qualified to tell IS researchers in Asia how they should be doing their research.  Rather, I take a more humble position.  I will speak as a North American IS researcher who believes that North American IS research has done well, but has not done all that it could have, or should have, in the past 20 years.  On the one hand, IS research in North America has advanced remarkably over the past 20 years, but on the other hand, it has made some mistakes in foregoing certain research directions.  IS researchers in North America are on the road to perpetuating these mistakes.  And given the dominance or imperialism that North American research often imposes on the rest of the world, it would be better for all of us to question this dominance rather than automatically follow it.  Therefore, my position is that, here in Asia, you might take advantage of the past mistakes of North American IS research as a starting point for doing something different, rather than waste your time and resources in re-inventing the wheel and repeating these mistakes.

So, my perspective is American, where my thinking has been strongly influenced by engineering and operations research, and strongly mediated by behavioral science.  In the last 18 years that I have spent as a professor, I have brought this overall background to bear in my work as a researcher and editor in the IS field.

Three Dilemmas for IS Research

Before I talk about the problems I see in IS research, I must emphasize the positive achievements for which IS research in North America deserves to be credited.