The proposal in this paper is that the development of a prestigious grand theory in the information systems (IS) field is possible, opportune, and would be of considerable benefit to the field. ‘Prestigious’ is taken in this context to mean achieving a degree of renown, ideally with the public at large, but at least within the academy. While significant benefits could derive from the application of such a theory in research and practice, its primary value to the discipline would be as a resource contributing to its public image. An influential theory is a statement that its originating discipline is a source of marketable ideas, and worthy therefore of interest and respect.

The theoretical grounding for the paper is derived primarily from Bourdieu’s concepts of social power and social fields (Bourdieu, 1980; Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992; Swartz, 1997). On this, the IS field –comprising an array of academics, professionals, and institutions – is conceptualised as engaged in a more or less continuous struggle for relative power and status with other disciplines. The assets supporting or enabling participation in such struggles include both economic and cultural capital, where cultural capital is the combination of ideas, knowledge and research that are seen as intrinsically linked to the field, and which form the basis for its academic and community standing (Bourdieu, 1980). Major theories are, in this perspective, items of symbolic capital that have value as the end products of significant intellectual efforts.

While popular theory is always likely to be of benefit to a discipline (Abbott, 1988), such a development would be particularly opportune within the IS field at a time when talk of disciplinary crisis is in the air (Markus, 1999; Khazanchi and Munkvold, 2000; Benbasat and Zmud, 2003; Hirschheim and Klein, 2003). In relating the development of theory to the issue of disciplinary success, the argument is that the visibility and prestige of other disciplines has been shown to depend partly on their capacity to engage the public’s interest in their intellectual products (Abbott, 2001). ‘The public’ in this context can be construed in a number of ways, ranging from a general population concerned with a variety of social trends and issues, to academic authorities responsible for allocating funds and determining relative resourcing priorities (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997).

The term ‘grand theory’ is used here to refer to the type of overarching theory constituted by a set of umbrella concepts designed to explain a broad range of social phenomena, and robust enough to act as the conceptual framework for a variety of research programs dealing with empirical data. Examples from other disciplines would include Marxism (Marx, 1981), psychoanalysis (Freud, 1938) and rational choice (Coleman, 1990). It is notable that such theories do not need to be generally accepted as correct to have a public impact, as recurrent surges of interest in Margaret Mead’s anthropological theories demonstrate (Freeman, 1997; Freeman, 2000).

The claim that theory can be valuable is not to say that a powerful theory can be developed on request. But the argument in this paper extends to the claim that there is at least one area of general interest that IS theorists are ideally placed to address. The types of phenomena of concern are discussed in detail later in the paper, but can be briefly outlined here. In broad terms, the view is that IS structures for dealing with some basic types of business transactions such as account payments are becoming highly standardised and pervasive in social life, and are beginning to reduce the number of possibilities for social change. A number of related trends are driving this development, including data sharing among organisations and government departments, inter-organisational systems based on generalised data and process definitions, the emergence of systems with some degree of social autonomy (automated teller machines provide a simple but representative example [Dos Santos and Peffers, 1995]), and the widespread adoption of high profile proprietary enterprise software packages from vendors such as SAP and Oracle (Davenport, 1998). This trend and its social effects do not appear to have received comprehensive theoretical treatment in the IS field or elsewhere; in IS because the extant theories of IS integration (Segars and Grover, 1996; Wyzalek, 2000) and competitive advantage (Kettinger et al., 1995) that deal with large-scale IS structures do not address wider social effects, and elsewhere because theorists in other fields have tended to gloss over IS realities in favour of highly generalised and bland assumptions about IT capabilities (e.g. Bogard, 1996).

The view that gave rise to the development of this paper is that the IS field has an urgent need to improve its public profile, and that theory development along the proposed lines can help to achieve this. The underlying assumption is that the field is in fact in a state of crisis (Hirschheim and Klein, 2003), and that this stems from a combination of lost visibility with an emerging identity problem (Benbasat and Zmud, 2003). The presumption here is that IS is a significant discipline that addresses a specific set of issues and interests using its own concepts and techniques (Hirschheim and Klein, 2003). The need is, however, to convince external parties that IS offers value that cannot be provided by other disciplines, and that it addresses a particular set of practical and theoretical issues better than any potential competitor could.