The Theory-Practice Gap in IS: Who Is This Research For?

A few months ago, I was trying to explain my dissertation research to a relative who works as an IT manager at a mid-size company. He manages systems for a living. He makes exactly the kinds of decisions that IS research is supposed to inform. After about five minutes, he nodded politely and asked if there was a practical takeaway he could use this week. I did not have a good answer.

The rigor-relevance debate in IS research is one of the oldest ongoing arguments in the field. Benbasat and Zmud (1999) are frequently cited as the canonical statement of the problem: IS research had drifted away from its core phenomenon, the IT artifact and its use in organizational contexts, and toward importing theories from reference disciplines without adding IS-specific insight. Their point was not just about topic drift. It was that research optimized for theoretical sophistication had become harder and harder to connect to the decisions that practitioners actually face. The four dimensions they proposed for relevance, that research should be interesting, applicable, current, and accessible, sound obvious. They are also extremely difficult to satisfy simultaneously if your primary audience is a peer reviewer checking your methodology.

Hassan and Mathiassen (2017) described the IS field's ongoing concern about relevance as dating back decades, calling it a "fragmented adhocracy" where internal communication deficits are matched by external disconnects from practitioners. This is not a new crisis. It has been the background condition of the field for most of its history.

What the practitioner accessibility problem looks like in practice is this: a paper published in MIS Quarterly might be 30-40 pages long, written in technical language that assumes familiarity with the theoretical framework being extended, full of SEM output and measurement model tables, and behind a paywall. A CIO trying to decide whether to invest in a new AI platform has neither the time nor the background to read it, even if the paper's findings are directly relevant to that decision. The knowledge is locked inside the academic system.

The citation pattern problem is different but related. IS papers cite each other extensively. They cite papers from reference disciplines like psychology, sociology, and economics. They cite practitioner publications rarely, and when they do it is usually to establish that a phenomenon exists or that the topic is currently salient. Practitioner publications, Gartner reports, McKinsey white papers, Harvard Business Review articles, cite academic IS research almost never. There are two conversations happening in parallel with very little crossover. A paper that changes the theoretical understanding of technology adoption in IS research has no mechanism to reach the person making adoption decisions in an organization.

McCarthy, Scholta, Hausvik, and Busch (2024) studied this gap using Bourdieu's framework, looking specifically at IS practitioner doctorates who were trying to operate in both academic and practice domains simultaneously. What they found was that bridging the gap requires active "boundary spanning" work, specific activities to traverse the different fields of academia and practice, and that this work is not automatic. It requires translating knowledge, building different kinds of credibility, and managing the tension between the standards of academic rigor and the standards of practical utility. The insight that stuck with me from their paper is that the bridge has to be actively built and maintained. It does not exist by default just because researchers intend their work to be relevant.

Gartner sits at the intersection of these two conversations in a way that no academic institution does. Their newsroom (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom) publishes research findings on timescales of weeks, in language practitioners can read without a methods background, addressing questions that organizations are actively debating. Gartner reads academic research, filters it, translates it, and packages it for practitioner audiences. This translation function is genuinely valuable. The problem is that it goes through a commercial intermediary with its own business model and incentives. Gartner's clients pay for access to research that helps them make decisions. That shapes what questions get answered and what conclusions get emphasized. Academic IS research does not have this commercial filter, but it also does not have an effective translation mechanism.

I think about my own work in relation to this constantly. The questions I find theoretically interesting are not always the ones most immediately applicable to a practicing IT manager. The methods I need to use to satisfy peer reviewers are not the ones that produce the most actionable results. The writing style that gets a paper accepted in a basket journal is not the writing style that a practitioner would read voluntarily. These are not personal failures of ambition or communication. They are structural features of a system that has optimized for one set of criteria while nominally claiming to care about another.

The IS research in developing countries literature makes this tension especially visible. Seetharaman, Mathew, and De' (2024) found that IS publications from India are relatively few, often not focused on context-specific issues, and concentrated in lower-ranked journals. The pressure toward basket journal publication, with its specific theoretical and methodological standards, pushes researchers toward questions and methods that fit those journals, regardless of whether those questions are the most relevant for local practice contexts. Global academic prestige structures shape local research agendas in ways that practitioners in those locations may not benefit from.

What does a more relevant IS research look like? I am genuinely not sure. More practitioner-facing publishing channels would help. But journals that are less rigorous in the academic sense risk losing the methodological quality that distinguishes research from consulting. Design science research, as Gregor and Hevner (2013) argued, offers a mode of research where building something useful for practice is itself a form of scholarly contribution. But design science papers are still evaluated by academic reviewers using academic criteria. The relevance cycle and the rigor cycle in Hevner's framework need to be connected, but in practice one usually dominates.

The honest answer to "who is this research for?" is that most IS research is for other IS researchers. Not because IS researchers are selfish or uncaring about practice, but because the incentive structure, publishing in basket journals, getting tenure, building a citation record, selects for that. Changing the answer to that question would require changing the incentives. That is a much harder problem than writing more accessible abstracts.