Baskerville and Myers make a case that the IS discipline is not only in good academic health, but also that it has reached a state of maturity: ‘the IS discipline is no longer just emerging, but has fully emerged as a discipline in its own right’ (Baskerville and Myers, 2002, p. 1). With maturity now achieved, it will become a source of ideas for other disciplines, in the same way that those disciplines have been a source of ideas for IS. As support for this, they point to the concern with rigour that has been a hallmark of IS research practice, the establishment of high quality journals, the emergence of IS ‘bodies of knowledge’, the development of IS literature, and the establishment of an ‘excellent scholarly communication network’ (Baskerville and Myers, 2002, pp. 3-5).

It would be possible to debate some of the issues the authors raise on a point-by-point basis. The bodies of knowledge they identify are, for instance, strongly oriented towards applications (and hence are appropriate to an applied discipline), whereas whatever references there are to abstract theory tend to be to speech act theory, socio-technical concepts, social construction, and other concepts that originate in other fields (Baskerville and Myers, 2002, p. 4). But while this is not just a minor concern, it is possible for the purposes of this paper to accept the authors’ major statements as fact, and still to question how they should be interpreted.

One of Baskerville and Myers’ key points is that papers originating in the IS field are now being cited in other disciplines, and they focus particularly on a widely admired paper by Markus on power and politics in the IT context (Markus, 1983). It is indisputable that the paper is of exceptional quality and deservedly well known. But as Baskerville and Myers acknowledge, it is also the case that the theories utilised in it were imported from other disciplines (Baskerville and Myers, 2002, p. 6), and not developed within IS. Further to this, Latour (1987) has demonstrated the existence of a snowball effect with citations, so that the chances of more citations increase with each new reference. The fact that the Markus paper was published in 1983 therefore becomes relevant. A different interpretation of the citation evidence is that researchers are referencing a paper generally acknowledged to be of exemplary quality, but without concern for its disciplinary origins. What the evidence does not show is whether researchers in other disciplines are in fact staying alert for opportunities to cite new developments in IS theory and practice; as Baskerville and Myers concede, ‘it is … possible that some of these disciplines are themselves too inwardly focused and the “not invented here” syndrome will prevail’ (Baskerville and Myers, 2002, p. 9).

While it is clear that the IS field has generated some extremely high-quality work and publications, this does not automatically translate into significant intellectual or academic influence. Avgerou notes that ‘from the conventional academic perspective, IS has serious limitations … it lacks the distinctiveness of theory and method that is usually associated with scientific disciplines … [and] does not have a clear location on the map of academic disciplines’ (Avgerou, 2000, p. 576). Although IS researchers continue to mine reference disciplines for useful concepts, there seems to be no evidence that IS ideas are being adopted in the same way within other disciplines. To take a specific example, Baskerville and Myers discuss business re-engineering as an area of attention in IS, yet while it is surely correct to say that IS researchers have ‘studied [re-engineering] quite extensively’ (Baskerville and Myers, 2002, p. 6), the idea originated as an organisational theory, and embeds no discernible theory of IS (Hammer and Champy, 1993).

To put the case in this way is not to dismiss the idea that IS could, and perhaps already should, be seen as a reference discipline. And, as the authors point out, there is surely no convincing reason to think that other disciplines are ‘more foundational’ than IS (Baskerville and Myers, 2002, p. 2). Nevertheless, in the absence of references to broad theories originating in the IS field, the widespread citation of some IS papers seems to imply a recognition of credible research rather than any acknowledgement of IS as an independently significant academic discipline. Overall, there seems little direct evidence to challenge the view that IS, to the extent it is understood and acknowledged as an independent field at all, is generally seen as an applied discipline primarily concerned with finding solutions to technical problems.

A critical point is whether IS benefits from an extreme diversity of topics (Banville and Landry, 1989), so that the development of new conference tracks is therefore a sign of disciplinary health (Baskerville and Myers, 2002, p. 11). That view is questioned here on the grounds that the persistent search for new issues to explore requires a constant probing into contested academic territories, and is therefore counter-productive for the development of cumulative discipline-specific knowledge. While this trend reflects the vitality and excitement of working in a new field (Avgerou, 2000), it does not improve the discipline’s chances of defining and sustaining a distinctive academic profile. Perhaps what the issue shows is the potential for the interests of individual academics to clash to some extent with those of the other field, and these are matters that cannot be resolved on principle.