Maybe not the king,but an invaluable subordinate: a commentary on Avison and Malaurent's advocacy of'theory light'IS research

摘要

In their provocative Insights and Perspectives article 'Is theory king?', David Avison and Julien Malaurent identified and theorized a problem in our field and proposed a theory of how to solve it. In brief, they argued that (1) overemphasis on theory in leading IS journals has produced qualitative IS research that exhibits negative characteristics like oversimplification of complex reality, stifling of new avenues of investigation, inappropriate or misapplication of theory to empirical data, and trivial and uninteresting findings, and (2) this problem can be ameliorated by the openness of top IS journals to 'theory light' qualitative IS research articles, which would make other kinds of contributions than theoretical ones. Importantly, they argued that 'theory light' articles should complement, rather than replace, articles that make significant contributions to theory. In addition, they asserted that acceptable 'theory light' articles must be well executed, which they acknowledge will require strong editorial guidance of authors. In this commentary, I first explain why I'm predisposed to agree with Avison and Malaurent's call for the publication of high-quality 'theory light' qualitative IS research articles as a complement to theory-contributing papers. I then offer an additional rationale for 'theory light' qualitative research: 'Theory light' quantitative research (sometimes called 'big data' research) is already a prominent feature of top IS journals. Third, I propose an alternative theory of the problem that Avison and Malaurent identified: Outcomes like trivial and uninteresting findings in qualitative IS research might result, not only from overemphasis on theory, but also from conflicting or overly narrow definitions of theory and theoretical contribution. Consequently, I propose an alternative (or complement) to Avison and Malarent's solution: I advocate qualitative IS research that develops theories of substantive human and societal and/or IT-related problems and theories of solutions to those problems.