“Impact Engineering” or Social Responsibility?

Excerpt

In recent years, our discipline has been subject to a development that affects its core and has already triggered clearly perceptible changes. This development is characterized by two main aspects. The undoubtedly legitimate demand for internationalization – scientific competition does not stop at country or language barriers – creates a need to publish in English. At the same time, Business and Information Systems Engineering is also confronted with increasing and more complex justification challenges. In the early days of the discipline, legitimacy and reputation were achieved primarily through “practice impact” (e.g., successful application projects) and high numbers of students. Under the influence of international conventions, another reputation mechanism has gained significance in recent years, namely “scientific impact”. Since scientific impact is a multidimensional construct, more or less simplistic metrics have been proposed to capture it. These are mainly based on the result of scientific work most easily quantifiable, namely publications. Even worse, the evaluation of publications itself is often reduced to the assessment of its publication outlet’s reputation. Top-rated journals are mainly found in the Information Systems discipline (i.e., not in the more “technical” sub-disciplines of BISE), as the Information Systems discipline has undergone considerable pressure to justify its scientific significance at business schools for more than 30 years. …