The author de Solla Price (1961, 1963) believed it was possible to trace the history of a discipline through its artefacts, which included the number of researchers as well as the number of papers, journals and scientific societies it engendered. He referred to the difficulty of a new field in making progress, and the characteristic that large disciplines grew faster than small ones (1963). This could be because large disciplines are more able to control critical rewards and exert political power and so meet the first criterion for Whitley’s establishment of scientific fields—controlling critical rewards through a range of mechanisms of control.
Taking a disciplinary perspective results in cross-fertilisation and an increased sense of unity (Becher 1994), which brings other benefits in turn. Disciplinary cultures frequently span institutional and national boundaries (Becher 1994). A social mechanism, the ‘invisible college’, was described by de Solla Price (1961; 1963). Culnan (1987) defined invisible colleges as the clustering of researchers into informal networks, ‘which tend to concentrate on examining common questions in common ways’. De Solla Price (1963) saw membership of an invisible college as conferring power and status on an individual and the network. As these networks of researchers are better placed to lobby for better access to resources and funds (Ridley 1997) than individuals, individuals and researcher networks are likely to be advantaged by an increased awareness and understanding of their discipline.
The following brief examinations of two other disciplines are presented to demonstrate that it is possible to analyse disciplines from the perspective of their development and it is advantageous to do so. The reader is asked to note reference to approaches to clarify the nature and development of disciplines in the following vignettes, as identified from the review of the literature presented earlier.
An examination of the early development of two other related disciplines could help clarify the development of IS.
Whitley (1984a) tracked the development of management as a discipline. Like IS, management has been categorised as a fragmented adhocracy, but it has had a longer history. Management originated as a distinct discipline about 1960. Until the late 1950s, US business schools taught material from economics, mathematics and psychology. The distinct labour market that emerged after a critical mass of management doctorates graduated allowed the specification of a management doctorate and scholarly repute as criteria for appointment to academic positions and senior posts in management. These developments allowed management researchers to distance themselves from lay criteria and standards and increased their degree of mutual dependence. Consequentially, these changes limited their need to seek approval from non-management audiences for reputations and rewards (Whitley 1984a). It can be seen in this brief vignette that a specific doctoral qualification in management, and the achievement of a critical mass of doctoral graduates, were keys that led to the development of the management discipline.
Many management sub-disciplines experienced a need to debate the most appropriate traditions to direct their research and choice of research methods. This has been true of organisational behaviour, accounting, marketing, strategic management and policy, operations management and operations research (Klein et al. 1991). It is little surprise then that IS has not escaped similar debate.
Computer science is another discipline that can be used to demonstrate that the concerns of the IS community for the future of its discipline are not unique. Computer science experienced problems associated with the youth of its academics (Gries and Marsh 1988), the diverse backgrounds of its researchers (Hopcroft 1987) and a need to ‘cease its largely inward-looking activities and branch outward’ (Gries et al. 1989). Doubts were later expressed about the future of the discipline and fears that computer science could become irrelevant (Freeman 1995). There were calls for computer science to develop its own disciplinary characteristics and to avoid emulating high-status disciplines such as physics (Hartmanis 1995b). Other researchers in the same discipline debated the nature of computer science and tried to determine if it was a subset of engineering, science, mathematics or something more (Denning et al. 1989; Hartmanis 1995a). King (1994a) observed that the majority of computer science departments were found within engineering schools, and that very few were completely independent with the same status as other schools.