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The scholarly influence of Heinz Klein: ideational and social measures of his impact on IS research and IS scholars

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European Journal of Information Systems

Abstract

Heinz Klein was a fine scholar and mentor whose work and life have inspired us to explore the notion of ‘scholarly influence’ which we cast as ‘ideational’ and ‘social influence’. We adopt a portfolio of measures approach, using the Hirsch family of statistics to assess ideational influence and Social Network Analysis centrality measures for social influence to profile Heinz Klein's contribution to information systems (IS) research. The results show that Heinz was highly influential in both ideational terms (a significant body of citations) and social terms (he is close to the heart of the IS research community). Reflecting on the major research themes and scholarly values espoused by Klein we define a ‘Kleinian view of IS research’, grounded in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, and use that to frame four affirmative propositions to address what we observe to be a distortion and attenuation of the academic discourse on the evaluation of scholarly production. This paper argues that focus should be shifted from the venue of publication of the research to the uptake of the ideas contained in it, thus increasing the openness of the discourse, participation in the discourse, truthfulness, and reduction of the inequities in power distribution within academia.

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Notes

  1. We are testing our analysis, beliefs and positions against the set of principals set forth by Klein & Myers (1999, 2011). We do this by explicitly identifying the principle we believe is present in our narrative.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank and recognize Lynette Kvasny for her comments, encouragement and pointers to literature addressing power imbalances and distorted communication in gender and race in the academic discourse and to Michael Gallivan for his critical insights that continue to help fuel this whole research program. We would also like to acknowledge the people who were able to reallocate time in their extraordinarily busy schedules to travel, some over great distance, to Atlanta, 18–19 May 2007 and participate in the workshop and festschrift event titled ‘Beyond Singer – Kleinian Inquiry into the IS Discipline’ on very short notice. In a real sense each of these persons helped shape this paper. Those attendees were: Zaheer Asif, Jayailaka Bandula, Raymond Barnes, Andrew Basden, Richard Baskerville, Richard Boland, Lisa Caldwell, Kevin Crowston, Michael Cuellar, Uldarico ‘Rex’ Dumdum, Delvin Grant, Nik Hassan, Margaratha Hendrickx, Rudy Hirschheim, Heinz Klein, Munir Mandviwalla, Lars Mathiassen, Eph McLean, Ojelanki Ngwenyama, Hans Oppelland, Owen Plowman, Gabriel Ramirez, Dan Robey, Hiro Takeda, Duane Truex III, John Venable, and Richard Welke.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. CIS Department, J. Mack Robinson College of Business, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, U.S.A.

    Duane Truex & Hirotoshi Takeda

  2. Department of Information Technology and Media, Mittuniversitetet, Sundsvall, Sweden

    Duane Truex

  3. School of Business, North Carolina Central University, Durham, NC, U.S.A.

    Michael Cuellar & Hirotoshi Takeda

  4. University of Paris Dauphine, Centre de Recharche en Management & Organization Centre de Recharche Economique, Paris Cédex

    Hirotoshi Takeda

  5. School of Information Systems, Technology and Management in the Australian School of Business, University of New South Wales, Australia

    Richard Vidgen

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Truex, D., Cuellar, M., Takeda, H. et al. The scholarly influence of Heinz Klein: ideational and social measures of his impact on IS research and IS scholars. Eur J Inf Syst 20, 422–439 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1057/ejis.2011.16

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