Methodological Pluralism in Business and Information Systems Engineering?

Excerpt

For some time now, the Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) research community in the German-speaking countries has continuously been concerned with the development of the field as scientific discipline. This may be attributed to several reasons. First, it is a natural and necessary process for a scientific community to self-critically reflect its own discipline from time to time, especially after growth phases of a young science or after changes in the objects of research caused by technological innovations. Another reason is the necessity of internationalization, which among others led to a discussion of methods regarding behaviorist oriented and design science oriented research approaches in BISE (Österle et al. 2010). Following this, concerns have been expressed that design-oriented approaches commonly used in German-speaking countries will yield to more behavioral approaches in the future due to the pressure to publish internationally, which would not only lead to a loss of identity of German BISE but also to a reduction of the methodological pluralism harmful to the relevance of the discipline. Furthermore, a discussion has recently begun in the community on which future contents and topics the focus will be laid. Issue 1/2014 of this journal will deal with “Research Areas in Business and Information Systems Engineering”.¹ In a wide-ranging survey Peter Mertens identifies the “Grand Challenges” of BISE. In referring to initiatives in other scientific disciplines, a “Grand Challenge” is understood as a fundamental challenge and task whose solution shows significant social or economic progress, and which should be possibly applied in middle or long terms (Mertens and Barbian 2013). Finally, resulting from the ever increasing dissemination of IT in many economic and social areas, the need arises for a new relation to our reference disciplines. Computer science increasingly opens itself towards more applied research questions, in economics and management IT-based methods are considered original methods of their own field, e.g., in the fields of marketing and controlling. …