IS Research Borrows Constantly. That's the Problem and the Point.

The first time I tried to explain my field to someone outside of academia, they asked what IS researchers actually study that sociologists, economists, or computer scientists do not already cover. I gave a fumbling answer about the intersection of technology and organizations. They nodded the way people nod when they do not want to press further. I have been working on a better answer ever since, and I am not sure I have one that fully satisfies even me.

IS research draws its theories from a wide range of reference disciplines. From economics it borrows transaction cost economics, agency theory, and the resource-based view. From sociology it borrows institutional theory, structuration theory, and actor-network theory. From psychology it borrows cognitive theories, social cognitive theory, and the entire tradition that produced TAM through Davis (1989). From computer science it borrows systems design, human-computer interaction foundations, and increasingly machine learning concepts. Banker and Kauffman (2004) mapped this out as five IS research streams: decision support and IT value, economics of IS, organizational and strategic use of IT, HCI and behavioral IS research, and technical and systems design. That map is useful for orientation, but it also reveals the problem. The streams look like subdisciplines borrowed from economics, sociology, behavioral science, and computer science, with "information systems" as the organizing label rather than the organizing theory.

The borrowing is not incidental. IS built itself by importing mature theoretical frameworks from fields with longer histories. This made early IS research faster and more credible than it would have been if the field had tried to develop entirely novel theory from scratch. But it also created a dependency. When you explain adoption using a model derived from psychology (TAM), when you explain IT governance using agency theory from economics, when you explain implementation success using institutional theory from sociology, the IS element has to be more than context. Otherwise you are doing psychology, economics, or sociology with a technology backdrop, not IS research.

Benbasat and Zmud (2003) named this as the IS identity crisis. Their argument was that the field had drifted from its core phenomenon, the IT artifact, toward generic organizational and behavioral topics that happened to involve technology in a peripheral way. Orlikowski and Iacono (2001) documented this empirically, finding that 88 percent of papers they reviewed treated the IT artifact through a nominal, tool, proxy, or computational view rather than the Ensemble view that explicitly links the artifact with social action. In other words, the theories were borrowed, but the IS element, the part that makes the research distinctively about information systems, was treated as background.

Sarker et al. (2019) updated this picture. Their sociotechnical axis classified IS research into types based on how seriously IT is theorized. About 56 percent of papers were Type I, where IT is purely background with no theoretical role. Type IV, where social and technical dimensions interact in a theoretically meaningful way, accounted for only about 13 percent. The identity crisis that Benbasat and Zmud described was not historical. It was still the empirical condition of the field.

Sidorova et al. (2008) approached the same question from a different angle, using latent semantic analysis of abstracts from MISQ, ISR, and JMIS to identify what the field actually studies. They found five stable IS core areas: IT and organizations, IS development, IT and individuals, IT and markets, and IT and groups. These areas are stable across time, which shows the field has a recognizable intellectual structure. But topical stability is not the same as theoretical distinctiveness. You can have consistent topics while the theoretical work is still done by borrowed frameworks from other disciplines.

The honest characterization of IS is that it is an applied discipline organized around a phenomenon, the development and use of information technology in organizational and social contexts, rather than a unique theoretical tradition. This is not necessarily a problem. Medicine is organized around the phenomenon of human health, not around a unique method or theory base. But the comparison reveals something: medicine contributed back to parent disciplines by making discoveries about human physiology that changed what biologists understood. The question for IS is whether it has done the same.

My reading of the literature suggests that IS has contributed back, though less than it has borrowed. The IS research on network effects and platform dynamics produced insights that informed economic and strategy thinking on two-sided markets. Design science research, as Hevner, March, Park, and Ram (2004) framed it, developed rigorous standards for artifact-based knowledge creation that have influenced research practice in fields like software engineering and human-computer interaction. The effective use framework, connecting information quality, system quality, and outcome benefits in ways that TAM could not, offered a richer account of system success that fed back into IS theory in a way that practitioners from multiple disciplines now cite. These are genuine IS contributions, not just applications of borrowed frameworks. But they are rare compared to the volume of work that imports theory from elsewhere.

The identity problem that borrowing creates is not solved by stopping the borrowing. IS would be a weaker field if it rejected institutional theory, transaction cost economics, or cognitive psychology. These frameworks explain real things about technology adoption, implementation, governance, and use. The question is whether IS researchers apply them with enough theoretical care to produce knowledge that could not have been produced by someone working in the parent discipline alone. That requires centering the IT artifact, not just naming it. It requires specifying what is different about the phenomenon when information technology is involved, not just treating technology as a contextual variable.

The opportunity in being a borrowing discipline is that IS can serve as a bridge. When institutional theory produces a finding about IS implementation, that finding can enrich institutional theory if IS researchers are careful about what the technology contributed to the mechanism. When cognitive psychology explains how users process digital information differently than print, IS researchers studying those interactions can produce insights that flow back into cognitive psychology. The bridge function works in both directions, but only if IS is disciplined enough to say what is distinctive about its object of study. That discipline is what the identity debate is really about, and it is still unresolved.