Literature review

I shared a list of scholarly references today in the hope that they would be useful for the student's IS research. I had put it off yesterday because I didn't recall citing any significant MIS literature during my own Master's work about open source innovation. Hence, I thought I wouldn't be able to assemble such a thing without a full day of further research.

(My co-supervisor had also cc:ed me on some literature by an apparently big name in the design part of MIS... I will need to be conversent on this body of work. At first glance, MIS appears well poised to discover functionalism as a style.)

To my surprise, I found that I had cited generously from /ASQ/, /MISQ/, /AMR/, /HBR/, and various organizational, design, business communications, and /research/ information management literatures without thinking about it from an MIS perspective. I had also forgotten that my external examiner was from the research information systems part of a business school, and that several of my previous research collaborators are IS people who also study research and innovation systems. Perhaps I have osmosed something about MIS after all, and I expect to learn more from this supervising adventure.

In my e-mail to the student, I tried to make it clear that he was only to consider what might be useful, and not to attempt to read or cite all of the highlighted references I sent. My co-supervisor seems more hands on with supervising the student; I hope to offer a relief valve if that becomes required.

I had also debated whether to include references my other bodies of work (urban innovation systems, e-democracy, associative governance) since they have nothing to do with the student's research area concerning e-commerce APIs and integration. In the end, I left in the urban innovation systems since the student's topic could be usefully framed as a knowledge flow topic within/among some local technology clusters.

On Monday, the student is supposed to deliver a brief paragraph about how he might approach a research question. I don't expect that he will have read Schumpeter, Foucault, Norman, Glaser, Henderson and Clark, Leydesdorff, Rogers, Latour, or von Hippel over the weekend, but I'm willing to be surprised.