Are We Still Talking to Ourselves? An Analysis of the Introspective Information Technology Field by Brazilian Experts

Information Technology Research And Practice In Brazil

In the second half of the 20^th century, business schools faced severe criticism about the quality of their research. In the 1970s and 1980s, assessments about the rigor in management research intensified, and the result was a series of documents with unfavorable statements about the rigor of research in business schools (Robey & Markus, 1998; Davenport & Markus, 1999). Bertero, Caldas and Wood Jr. (1999, p. 151, our translation) believe that this was also the case in the Brazilian production:

In the 1990s, the IT field – that can be framed as a branch of management (Graeml & Macadar, 2010) – gives itself the challenge to become a discipline on its own. Towards that goal, IT researchers assumed that there was a need to invest in methodological rigor. Rigor in fact is an important dimension of research related to the identity of a discipline (Bakshi & Krishna, 2007).