The Discipline of Information Systems

The context of this paper is the recent downturn in information systems (IS) student enrollment which has had negative implications for the academic employment of doctoral students in IS. We regard this downturn as a temporary phenomenon: there have been cycles of enrollments in the past in all disciplines, and these will continue. Indeed, at the time of writing there are signs that the present cycle has bottomed out and student demand for places has increased as the demand for qualified IS people has increased in organizations (albeit with a lag of a few years). This will inevitably lead to an increased demand for our doctoral graduates in universities. Clearly, steps must be taken to minimize such problems in the short term. But in this paper we take a longer-term view. We first examine the status of the discipline of information systems using the cultural web model of Johnson and Scholes (1993). This suggests that there are longer-term problems relating to the status, and therefore the power, of people in the discipline. We must address these underlying problems to ensure there are no similar employment difficulties for our doctoral students in the future. We suggest potential approaches to address the underlying causes of problems revealed using the cultural model. These suggestions include increased representation i