Which research methods are better, quantitative or qualitative? What is more important, getting a richer picture of what goes on in organizations, or seeking generalizable insights about causality? This debate has raged at the very least since Glaser and Strauss popularized the grounded theory method in the mid twentieth century. In 2025, we want to put this debate to rest. We asked one of the best econometric scholars we know (Brad Greenwood) and one of the best qualitative scholars we know (Youngjin Yoo) to fight this debate on air and come up with their very own end-of-all arguments. The result? It may surprise you: We all ought to get mad.

Episode reading list

Chang, H. (2008). Inventing Temperature: Measurement and Scientific Progress. Oxford University Press.

Burtch, G., Carnahan, S., & Greenwood, B. N. (2018). Can You Gig It? An Empirical Examination of the Gig Economy and Entrepreneurial Activity. Management Science, 64(12), 5497-5520.

Greenwood, B. N., Kobayashi, B. H., & Starr, E. P. (2025). Can You Keep a Secret? Banning Noncompetes Does Not Increase Trade Secret Litigation. SSRN, https://ssrn.com/abstract=4771171.

Kraemer, K. L., Dickhoven, S., Tierney, S. F., & King, J. L. (1987). Datawars: The Politics of Modeling in Federal Policymaking. Columbia University Press.

Roth, J., Sant'Anna, P. H. C., Bilinski, A., & Poe, J. (2023). What’s Trending in Difference-in-Differences? A Synthesis of the Recent Econometrics Literature. Journal of Econometrics, 235(2), 2218-2244.

Matherly, T., & Greenwood, B. N. (2024). No News is Bad News: The Internet, Corruption, and the Decline of the Fourth Estate. MIS Quarterly, 48(2), 699-714.

Levitt, S. D., & Dubner, S. J. (2005). Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything. William Morrow.

Greenwood, B. N., & Wattal, S. (2017). Show Me the Way to Go Home: An Empirical Investigation of Ride-Sharing and Alcohol Related Motor Vehicle Fatalities. MIS Quarterly, 41(1), 163-187.

King, A. A. (2025). Does Corporate Social Responsibility Increase Access to Finance? A Commentary on Cheng, Ioannou, and Serafeim (2014). Strategic Management Journal, forthcoming. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4647425.

Seidel, S., Frick, C. J., & vom Brocke, J. (2025). Regulating Emerging Technologies: Prospective Sensemaking through Abstraction and Elaboration. MIS Quarterly, 49(1), 179-204.

Pentland, B. T. (1999). Building Process Theory with Narrative: From Description to Explanation. Academy of Management Review, 24(4), 711-725.

Lee, J., & Berente, N. (2013). The Era of Incremental Change in the Technology Innovation Life Cycle: An Analysis of the Automotive Emission Control Industry. Research Policy, 42(8), 1469-1481.

Anderson, P., & Tushman, M. L. (1998). Technological Discontinuities and Dominant Designs: A Cyclical Model of Technological Change. Administrative Science Quarterly, 35(4), 604-633.

Brynjolfsson, E., & Hitt, L. M. (1996). Paradox Lost? Firm-Level Evidence on the Returns to Information Systems Spending. Management Science, 42(4), 541-558.

Noe, R. (2025). Moral Incoherence During Category Emergence: The Contentious Case of Connected Toys. Harvard Business School Working Paper, 24-071, https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=65988.

We continue with our special “Ask us anything” episode to celebrate the centenary of the This IS Research podcast. This time, we handle questions such as “do we have to worry about ontology?" - No; "should we engage in community building?" Yes; and “what have you learned from the podcast?” A whole lot - and we hope you have learned a thing or two along the way as well.

Episode reading list

Meyer, J. W., & Rowan, B. (1977). Institutionalized Organizations: Formal Structure as Myth and Ceremony. American Journal of Sociology, 83(2), 340-363.

James, W. (1907). Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking. Hackett Publishing.

Gal, U., Berente, N., & Chasin, F. (2022). Technology Lifecycles and Digital Innovation: Patterns of Discourse Across Levels of Abstraction: A Study of Wikipedia Articles. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 23(5), 1102-1149.

Faik, I., Barrett, M., & Oborn, E. (2020). How Information Technology Matters in Societal Change: An Affordance-Based Institutional Perspective. MIS Quarterly, 44(3), 1359-1390.

Leonardi, P. M. (2010). Digital Materiality? How Artifacts Without Matter, Matter. First Monday, 15(6), https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v15i6.3036.

Goebeler, L., Hukal, P., & Xiao, X. (2024). Four Roles of Physicality in Digital Innovation: A Theoretical Review. Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 33(4), 101862.

Faulkner, P., & Runde, J. (2019). Theorizing the Digital Object. MIS Quarterly, 43(4), 1279-1302.

Dwivedi, Y. K., Kshetri, N., Hughes, L., Slade, E. L., Jeyaraj, A., . . . Wright, R. T. (2023). "So what if ChatGPT wrote it?” Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Opportunities, Challenges and Implications of Generative Conversational AI for Research, Practice and Policy. International Journal of Information Management, 71, 102642.

We have an anniversary to celebrate: one hundred episodes of the This IS Research podcast. We mark the occasion by answering questions we received from our audience: Which bear is the best, who likes a hug more... and what advice would we give about starting as an assistant professor, pivoting your research, and what books to read. All this and much more in part one of our “ask us anything” episode.

Episode reading list

Fort, T. (2003). The Book of Eels. HarperCollins.

Nazar, S. (1999). A Beautiful Mind. Simon & Schuster.

Frankl, V. E. (1946). Man’s Search for Meaning. Beacon Press.

Ashby, W. R. (1956). An Introduction to Cybernetics. Chapman & Hall.

Card, O. S. (1985). Ender’s Game. Tor Books.

Beer, S. (1974). Designing Freedom. CBC Learning Systems.

Simon, H. A. (1947). Administrative Behavior: a Study of Decision-Making Processes in Administrative Organization. Macmillan.

Newell, A., & Simon, H. A. (1972). Human Problem Solving. Prentice-Hall.

March, J. G., & Simon, H. A. (1958). Organizations. John Wiley & Sons.

Urquhart, C., Berente, N., Recker, J. (2021). Naughty Grounded Theory. This IS Research podcast episode, 22 December 2021.

Zwass, V., Berente, N., Recker, J. (2023). Never create a journal unless it is JMIS. This IS Research podcast episode, 31 May 2023.

Berente, N., Recker, J. (2022). Why we love what we do. This IS Research podcast episode, 18 May 2022.

Jason Thatcher is back on the show and he is bringing decades of experiences as a journal editor. So we decided we play a game of round robin where each of us is giving rules of what to do (or not to do) as an editor. How long can we sit on papers before we make decisions? On what basis should we offer revise and resubmit decisions? When is it okay to desk reject a paper? How many reviews are enough? So if you want to learn more about the different editorial superhuman powers and supervillain powers – this is your episode.

Episode reading list

Recker, J. (2020). Reflections of a Retiring Editor-in-Chief. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 46(32), 751-761.

Berente, N., Gu, B., Recker, J., & Santhanam, R. (2021). Managing Artificial Intelligence. MIS Quarterly, 45(3), 1433-1450.

Li, J., Li, M., Wang, X., & Thatcher, J. B. (2021). Strategic Directions for AI: The Role of CIOs and Boards of Directors. MIS Quarterly, 45(3), 1603-1643.

Grisold, T., Berente, N., & Seidel, S. (2025). Guardrails for Human-AI Ecologies: A Design Theory for Managing Norm-Based Coordination. MIS Quarterly, 45, forthcoming.

Davis, J. L. (2020). How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things. MIT Press.

Majchrzak, A., & Malhotra, A. (2019). Unleashing the Crowd: Collaborative Solutions to Wicked Business and Societal Problems. Springer.

Gaskin, J., Berente, N., Lyytinen, K., & Yoo, Y. (2014). Toward Generalizable Sociomaterial Inquiry: A Computational Approach for Zooming In and Out of Sociomaterial Routines. MIS Quarterly, 38(3), 849-871.

Teodorescu, M., Morse, L., Awwad, Y., & Kane, G. C. (2021). Failures of Fairness in Automation Require a Deeper Understanding of Human–ML Augmentation. MIS Quarterly, 45(3), 1483-1499.

Lee, J., & Berente, N. (2012). Digital Innovation and the Division of Innovative Labor: Digital Controls in the Automotive Industry. Organization Science, 23(5), 1428-1447.

Berente, N., Salge, C. A. D. L., Mallampalli, V. K. T., & Park, K. (2022). Rethinking Project Escalation: An Institutional Perspective on the Persistence of Failing Large-Scale Information System Projects. Journal of Management Information Systems, 39(3), 640-672.

Is it okay to use large language models in the research process? For what task, exactly, and to automate the task or to augment the researcher? In this episode, we try to explore whether and how LLMs could be used in five aspects of the research process - for paper writing, reviewing, data analysis, as a subject of research, or as a surrogate for research subjects. We also discuss whether they should be used at all, and what some long-term consequences could be of such a choice, and we develop a number of heuristic rules to help researcher make decisions about using LLMs for research.

Episode reading list

Kankanhalli, A. (2024). Peer Review in the Age of Generative AI. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 25(1), 76-84.

Yang, Y., Duan, H., Liu, J., & Tam, K. Y. (2024). LLM-Measure: Generating Valid, Consistent, and Reproducible Text-Based Measures for Social Science Research. arXiv preprint, https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02234v1.

Li, J., Larsen, K. R. T., & Abbasi, A. (2020). TheoryOn: A Design Framework and System for Unlocking Behavioral Knowledge Through Ontology Learning. MIS Quarterly, 44(4), 1733-1772.

Larsen, K. R., Yan, S., & Lukyanenko, R. (2024). LLMs and Psychometrics: Global Construct Validity Integrating LLMs and Psychometrics. 45th International Conference on Information Systems, Bangkok, Thailand.

Anthis, J. R., Liu, R., Richardson, S. M., Kozlowski, A. C., Koch, B., Evans, J., Brynjolfsson, E., & Bernstein, M. (2025). LLM Social Simulations Are a Promising Research Method. arXiv preprint, https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.02234.

Abbasi, A., Somanchi, S., & Kelley, K. (2025). The Critical Challenge of using Large-scale Digital Experiment Platforms for Scientific Discovery. MIS Quarterly, 49(1), 1-28.

Is there a formula for doing and publishing research on digital phenomena? And if so, it is the same formula as the scripts for IS papers of the past, or has it changed? We discuss how our field has historically worked with reference theories from other disciplines and how we have moved beyond this one way of doing and publishing research to a variety of ways in which we can build theory about digital phenomena. We suggest that reference theories should not be viewed as immutable sacred cows but rather as a tentative basis of received wisdom, which we must problematize and adapt to move knowledge forward. Doing so requires us to find puzzles in the real world that point to things being different instead of new.

Episode reading list

Truex, D. P., Holmström, J., & Keil, M. (2006). Theorizing in Information Systems Research: A Reflexive Analysis of the Adaptation of Theory in Information Systems Research. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 7(12), 797-821.

Grover, V., & Lyytinen, K. (2015). New State of Play in Information Systems Research: The Push to the Edges. MIS Quarterly, 39(2), 271-296.

Ba, S., & Pavlou, P. A. (2002). Evidence of the Effect of Trust Building Technology in Electronic Markets: Price Premiums and Buyer Behavior. MIS Quarterly, 26(3), 243-268.

Jiang, L., Hou, J., Ma, X., & Pavlou, P. A. (2025). Punished for Success? A Natural Experiment of Displaying Clinical Hospital Quality on Review Platforms. Information Systems Research, https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2021.0630.

Grover, V., & Lyytinen, K. (2023). The Pursuit of Innovative Theory in the Digital Age. Journal of Information Technology, 38(1), 45-59.

Baiyere, A., Berente, N., & Avital, M. (2023). On Digital Theorizing, Clickbait Research, and the Cumulative Tradition. Journal of Information Technology, 38(1), 67-73.

Grisold, T., Kremser, W., Mendling, J., Recker, J., vom Brocke, J., & Wurm, B. (2023). Keeping Pace with the Digital Age: Envisioning Information Systems Research as a Platform. Journal of Information Technology, 38(1), 60-66.

Berente, N., Gu, B., Recker, J., & Santhanam, R. (2021). Managing Artificial Intelligence. MIS Quarterly, 45(3), 1433-1450.

Dell'Acqua, F., McFowland, E., Mollick, E. R., Lifshitz-Assaf, H., Kellogg, K., Rajendran, S., Krayer, L., Candelon, F., & Lakhani, K. R. (2023). Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality. Harvard Business School Technology & Operations Mgt. Unit Working Paper 24-013.

Fisher, G., Mayer, K. J., & Morris, S. (2021). From the Editors—Phenomenon-Based Theorizing. Academy of Management Review, 46(4), 631-639.

Gregory, R. W., & Henfridsson, O. (2021). Bridging Art and Science: Phenomenon-Driven Theorizing. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 22(6), 1509-1523.

Rogers, E. M. (2003). Diffusion of Innovations (5th ed.). Free Press.

Salge, C. A. D. L., & Karahanna, E. (2018). Protesting Corruption on Twitter: Is It a Bot or Is It a Person. Academy of Management Discoveries, 4(1), 32-49.

Abramova, O., Recker, J., Schemm, U., & Barwitzki, L.-D. (2025). Inclusion of Autistic IT Workforce in Action: An Auticon Approach. Information Systems Journal, https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12588.

Grisold, T., Seidel, S., Heck, M., & Berente, N. (2024). Digital Surveillance in Organizations. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 66(3), 401-410.

Dwivedi, Y. K., Kshetri, N., ... Wright, R. T. (2023). “So what if ChatGPT wrote it?” Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Opportunities, Challenges and Implications of Generative Conversational AI for Research, Practice and Policy. International Journal of Information Management, 71, 102642.

Our field of information systems is in the fortunate position that we have our own independent and self-governed association (we have more than one, in fact), which publishes one of the true top journals of our field, which means that the journal is entirely in our control as members. But as Monideepa Tarafdar, the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems argues, this privileged position also demands from us collective awareness, vigilance, and responsibility. We discuss some of the tensions that exist between journals and publishers and what it means for authors, reviewers, and editors to be mindful about journals and publishing platforms. We also talk about several of the key hallmark features of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems and how to make the best use of them when you submit your best work to the journal.

Episode reading list

Dennis, A. R., Valacich, J. S., Fuller, M. A., & Schneider, C. (2006). Research Standards for Promotion and Tenure in Information Systems. MIS Quarterly, 30(1), 1-12.

Adjerid, I., Angst, C. M., Devaraj, S., & Berente, N. (2023). Does Analytics Help Resolve Equivocality in the Healthcare Context? Contrasting Effects of Analyzability and Differentiation. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 24(3), 882-911.

Tarafdar, M., Shan, G., Thatcher, J. B., & Gupta, A. (2022). Intellectual Diversity in IS Research: Discipline-Based Conceptualization and an Illustration from Information Systems Research. Information Systems Research, 33(4), 1490-1510.

JAIS Workshop: Creating Policy Impact through Information Systems Research. LinkedIn Post by Monideepa Tarafdar, https://www.linkedin.com/posts/monideepa-tarafdar-302689_call-for-participation-journal-of-association-activity-7296267538001235968-eKwT?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAADlDdMBjNyuMhQtvmJtRw2TBKrPS4q5l9k.

King, J. L., & Kraemer, K. L. (2019). Policy: An Information Systems Frontier. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 20(6), 842-847.

McCarthy, C. (1985). Blood Meridian. Random House.

Majchrzak, A., and Markus, M. L. (2013). Methods for Policy Research: Taking Socially Responsible Action (2nd edition). Sage.

Yoo, Y. (2024) Evolving Epistemic Infrastructure: The Role of Scientific Journals in the Age of Generative AI. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 25(1), 137-144.