Second, there is the problem of the “reference discipline” strategy vs. the “independent discipline” strategy.  This is part of the continuing identity problem that plagues our IS field.

One aspect of this dilemma is what we IS scholars believe our IS field is, or ought to be.  Another aspect is what people outside of IS believe the IS field is, or ought to be.  Let me treat each aspect in turn.

As long as twenty years ago, we IS scholars began to discuss this problem in terms of “reference disciplines.”  The “reference discipline” approach poses the following question to frame our thinking: How might our IS field become more like one of the better established disciplines and live up to its scientific standards?  Examples of reference disciplines have included economics, management science, organizational behavior, accounting, and any other disciplines considered older and better established than IS.  I now believe that the act of referring to any other field as our “reference discipline” has been a strategic error.  It aggravates the identity problem in IS by automatically lowering our field as inferior to whatever other field is held up as the reference discipline and saying that we must imitate this other field.  This also invites the other field to judge what IS research is and what IS research should be doing.  And the time and effort that IS researchers spend on imitating a reference discipline actually serve to detract from the time and effort we should be spending on identifying what makes our own field unique and how we ought to nurture these unique features as we develop our own identity as an independent field.

Now, apart from how we IS scholars have looked at “reference disciplines,” how have scholars from these “reference disciplines” looked at IS?  The picture in the United
States is not a good one.  For instance, in the United States, there are some business schools that apparently believe that IS is so unimportant that they don’t even have a required IS course in their MBA programs, and many do not even have an IS department.  In some American business schools, IS is a subsidiary part of a larger department that includes other disciplines, such as management science or accounting, where the professors from the other disciplines actually impose their own ideas as to what IS researchers should be doing.  This has not been good news for untenured, assistant professors of IS in those departments.

The bottom line is that, whether among IS scholars ourselves or among scholars outside of IS, there is still not a clear, coherent picture as to what our field is, or ought to be.  Our lack of identity as a field leads to unclear and sometimes conflicting expectations, from ourselves and from others, as to the future directions of IS research.

One horn of the “reference discipline vs. independent discipline” dilemma is that if we, in IS, elevate another discipline as a superior field that we are supposed to imitate, then we would be saying that we are, at best, a subsidiary branch of another field -- and this would have the ironic effect of undercutting our own identity as a field.  The other horn of the dilemma is that if we choose to be or become an independent discipline, there is still no clear set of expectations or blueprints for how the IS field should develop.