The first construct of the framework relates to mechanisms of control and the IS knowledge base or core body of knowledge. It is to be expected that these will increase over time with the development of the discipline. With regard to mechanisms of control, the development of a discipline depends on reputations being established and critical rewards being obtained through a range of social processes. These mechanisms of control include attracting research funding, the introduction of publication outlets and the administrative location of IS groups in universities.
A particularly important mechanism involved in the development of a discipline is the emergence of a core body of knowledge. This has four components. The first is the establishment of research and teaching methods and standards, which refers to knowledge gain and transfer. The second component, a unique symbol set, enables unambiguous communication between initiates in the discipline and, in the process, prevents other disciplines trying to subsume the area into their own. The third component, key research and teaching of IS topics, sets out the knowledge domain, while the fourth component, laws, rules and evidenced guidelines, refers to the knowledge types required in the discipline.
The second framework construct concerns the degree of professionalism of the discipline, or accepted ways of undertaking IS research and teaching, and the extent to which it enables the community to withstand the impact of local contingencies. It is postulated that where a discipline is not highly professionalised, local contingencies such as political pressures have high impact. Consequently, the degree of professionalism of IS is suggested by the extent of variation in the nature of its research and teaching across the ‘states’ of Australia and over time.
It is argued that an examination of progress in the constructs and their components will reveal the nature and development of the IS academic discipline in Australia. This chapter reports on that examination, through a meta-analysis of the data collected and reported elsewhere in this volume. This analysis draws initially on points of similarity and difference from the ‘state’ case studies, and their relationship to the framework.
The framework constructs and their components guided the development of a protocol for the state reports in this volume (Gable 2006). The analysis presented below utilised data gathered in seven broad topic areas embodied in the common case-study protocol. The broad topic questions were:
What is the relative size of the IS presence at the university?
What is the administrative placement of IS (including changes over time)?
To what extent has IS at the university been impacted on by local contingencies?
To what extent is IS identified as a separate field at the university?
What are the distinctive features of the IS curriculum at the university?
What are the distinctive features of IS research at the university?
Who are the key people who have had an impact on IS in universities in the state?
The middle five topics were designed to gather data for evaluation of the framework, while the first and the last topics listed provided complementary information. The key people who have had an impact on IS in the states are not addressed in this chapter, as this has been presented in detail in the previous chapters through vignettes—and these data do not lend themselves to aggregation.
Thematic analysis was undertaken of the state reports presented in this volume (Dixon-Woods et al. 2005). Beyond reporting on the similarities and differences across the states from the perspective of the framework, the meta-analysis also aggregates the findings to provide an Australian perspective. This meta-analysis chapter comments further on several significant issues that lie outside the guiding framework.