Michael Cuellar

• PhD CIS
• Professor (Full) at Georgia Southern University

In researching IS phenomena, many different theoretical lenses have been advanced. This paper proposes the use of Margaret Archer's Morphogenetic Approach to Analytical Dualism MAAD as a social theoretic approach to explain why social phenomena may occur in a case study. This paper provides a brief overview to MAAD, providing a description of its t...

Assessing the research capital that a scholar has accrued is an essential task for academic administrators, funding agencies, and promotion and tenure committees worldwide. Scholars have criticized the existing methodology of counting papers in ranked journals and made calls to replace it (Adler & Harzing, 2009; Singh, Haddad, & Chow, 2007). In its...

Niemimaa (2016) argues that agential realism (Barad 2003) represents a radical form of sociomateriality (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al. 2014a; Orlikowski and Scott 2008) and that critical realism (Bhaskar 1979; Bhaskar 1997) represents a conservative form of sociomateriality and attempts to bring to the foreground the differences in the approaches so as t...

For a research field to advance, scholars must be able to openly exchange ideas. For this open exchange to exist, the contexts and methods that evaluate scholarly output must encourage this interchange. We argue that the current process for evaluating scholarly output, “counting articles in ranked venues” (CARV), creates pressures that result in a...

We thank Karlheinz Kautz for organizing this debate and the four respondent groups for their thoughtful and challenging comments. In this rejoinder, we take the opportunity to amplify and clarify some points that were perhaps unclear or misunderstood in our initial article and to respond to areas where we disagree. We also acknowledge proposed exte...

In this paper, I analyze the proposals made by Carte and associates and find them to be lacking in creating the “immersion” and “presence” needed to create the experience of face-to-face conferences. I offer alternative proposals for conferences using “metaverse” technologies. Various examples of technologies from science fiction and those existing...

The Database for Advances in Information Systems has sponsored a series of articles on the thought of Paul Feyerabend (Treiblmaier, 2018, 2019; Gregor, 2018, Burton- Jones-2018; Myers, 2018). Treiblmaier and the respondents discuss the actual meaning and implication of Feyerabend’s ideas for information systems. In reviewing the series, the authors...

The adoption and use of technology have been an important topic of research in Information Systems. However, projects create a different environment for technology adoption in that they are temporary organizations which are formed specifically for the project and then disbanded as opposed to the continuing organizations which have been traditionall...

The concept of project success in Information Systems and Project Management research has been one of the key concepts in the field. However, after years of research, the field agrees only that the concept of success is critical to the field, and there is no agreed upon definition or operationalization. This paper undertakes a critical review of th...

How the evaluation of research is conducted has significant effects on the field in terms of what work is done, how it is done and who is rewarded. This paper expands on Cuellar, et al (2016) by providing an extended description and critique of the existing method and an overview of its proposed replacement, the Scholarly Capital Model. It shows th...

The question of the influence of the IS field has been of interest for a number of years. Recently, Chatterjee and associates have proposed a set of metrics to assess the influence of a paper. No theoretical support for these metrics was provided however. This paper fills that gap by providing a process theory of influence and then deriving metrics...

This study examines the effectiveness of the method of using publication in ranked journals to evaluate the quality of scholarly output in the Information Systems field. Counting publications in ranked journals is the traditional method employed to evaluate scholarly output. Counting publications has been criticized for its lack of theoretical basi...

The evaluation of scholarly output is of great importance as it affects the lives of those in academia in terms of decisions on promotion, tenure and funding. In this evaluation, we seek to determine the quality of a scholar's research output. However, the concept of scholarly output quality has been under-theorized. In this research, we investigat...

Crowston (2016) makes several criticisms of “the scholarly capital model”. In sum, he argues that we fail to develop novel measures, continue the worst aspects of the current system in terms of encouraging co-authorships with old boys, reinforce journal list fetishes, and that the SCM still provides ample ways to game the system. In response to his...

This paper investigates the ontological status of project success. The literature shows that success has historically been considered to be an objective property of a project, one that can be assessed and the status of the project as a success or failure determined. However, this approach is shown to have serious deficiencies in dealing with certai...

The concept of project success in Information Systems and Project Management research has been one of the key concepts in the field. However, after years of research, the field agrees only that the concept of success is critical to the field, and there is no agreed upon definition or operationalization. This paper addresses these issues by undertak...

A short post publication review of a recent AJIS paper.

This research describes the state of the current process for the evaluation of scholarly output, a process that is highly dependent on the reputation of a set of journals that are thought to be guarantors of scholarly quality. We review the current system of evaluating scholarly output and describe its virtues and shortcomings. Then, based on Haber...

This paper presents a study of the deaf effect response to bad news reporting in an IT project management context. Using a mixed method approach that included both quantitative and qualitative data obtained through a laboratory experiment, our findings suggest that individuals turn a deaf ear to bad news reporting when bad news is received from a p...

Following previous research findings, this paper argues that the currently predominant method of evaluating scholar performance - publication counts in “quality” journals - is flawed due to the subjectivity inherent in the generation of the list of approved journals and absence of a definition of quality. Truex, Cuellar, and Takeda (2009) improved...

This paper presents a study of the deaf effect response to bad news reporting in an IT project management context. Using a mixed method approach that included both quantitative and qualitative data obtained through a laboratory experiment, our findings suggest that individuals turn a deaf ear to bad news reporting when bad news is received from a p...

Business analytics has become the latest fad in management practice. Carried out by largely positivist statistical analysis, anecdotal evidence claims great success for these practices. This paper takes a critical realist approach to a philosophical analysis of these practices. Reviewing CR ontology and epistemology, it applies those to the practic...

This study looks at small to medium sized online community (OC) and tries to identify ways to measure impact of the contributions of the users of the OC. OC's are dependent on contributions of their users to maintain the health of the OC. Measuring the health of an OC by identifying those users that have most influence and thus create more activity...

Online communities (OC's) depend on shared interests and user interactions mediated by technology. Successful OC's find ways to encourage these interactions to grow communities. Many OC's have influential users that help grow the community by their very presence and contributions. However, the process for identifying users having the greatest impac...

In researching IS phenomena, many different theoretical lenses have been advanced. This paper proposes the use of Margaret Archer’s Morphogenetic Approach to Analytical Dualism (MAAD) as a social theoretic approach to explain why social phenomena may occur in a case study. This paper provides a brief overview to MAAD, providing a description of its...

This research describes the current state of a scholarly publication machine that is highly dependent on journal rankings. Through a critique of the current system and the methodologies used to measure the notion of quality in scholarly research one can discover that the current system is set up to limit a system of open democratic discourse. The p...

Assessing the work of scholars is of great importance in the life of academic institutions, disciplines and scholars. Research suggests that that the notion of ‘scholarly influence’ should be substituted for current approaches towards judging scholarship (Truex et al. 2009). This paper seeks to examine the nature of the construct ‘scholarly influen...

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...

Assessing the work of scholars is of great importance in the life of academic institutions, disciplines and scholars. Research suggests that that the notion of 'scholarly influence' should be substituted for current approaches towards judging scholarship (Truex et al. 2009). This paper seeks to examine the nature of the construct 'scholarly influen...

The literature on online communities suggests those communities that grow successfully have members who create and share common bonds and common identities. Our goal in this research-in-progress paper is to better understand the impact that shared experiences have on user activities in online communities. We use PLS in a preliminary analysis of the...

This research describes the current state of a scholarly publication machine that is highly dependent on journal rankings. Through a critique of the current system and the methodologies used to measure the notion of quality in scholarly research one can discover that the current system is set up to limit a system of open democratic discourse. The p...

This paper reviews the literature on IS project success evaulation and finds that the concept of success currently used in both academia and practice is based on the notion of "triple constraint" -- project score, budget and schedule. This notion of success, derived from engineering, simplicity separate the project to develop the IT artifact from i...

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Following previous research findings, this paper argues that the current method of evaluating scholar performance, publication counts in "quality" journals is flawed by subjectivity in generating the list of approved journals and the definition of quality. Truex, Cuellar and Takeda (2009) sought to improve on this method by substituting the measure...

This study is part of a program aimed at creating measures enabling a fairer and more complete assessment of a scholar's contribution to a field, thus bringing greater rationality and transparency to the promotion and tenure process. It finds current approaches toward the evaluation of research productivity to be simplistic, atheoretic, and biased...

This study examines the use of the Hirsch family of indices to assess the scholarly influence of IS researchers. It finds that while the top tier journals are important indications of a scholar’s impact, they are neither the only nor indeed the most important sources of scholarly influence. In effect other ranking studies, by narrowly bounding the...

This study examines the use of journal rankings and proposes a new method of measuring IS journal impact based on the Hirsch family of indices (Hirsch 2005; Sidiropoulos et al. 2006). Journal rankings are a very important exercise in academia since they impact tenure and promotion decisions. Current methods employed to rank journal influence are sh...

This study examines the use of the Hirsch family of indices to assess the scholarly influence of IS researchers. It finds that while the top tier journals are important indications of a scholar's impact, they are neither the only nor indeed the most important sources of scholarly influence. In effect other ranking studies, by narrowly bounding the...

Project escalation is known to frequently occur in the context of information systems (IS) projects. The reluctance to hear bad news—a phenomenon that has been labelled the "deaf effect"—has been suggested as a possible reason for why projects are allowed to escalate for as long as they sometimes do. The deaf effect response to bad news reporting h...

The concept of system use has suffered from a "too simplistic definition" (DeLone and McLean [9], p. 16). This paper reviews various attempts at conceptualization and measurement of system use and then proposes a re-conceptualization of it as "the level of incorporation of an information system within a user's processes." We then go on to develop t...

This paper explores the applicability of the concepts of absorptive capacity and “ba” to ex ante project risk. We develop a hybrid framework to explain knowledge transfer based on these concepts—one that proposes a hybrid transference process. We then apply this framework to develop a methodology and metric for assessing ex ante software project ri...

This study examines the use of journal rankings and a relatively new method of measuring impact of research as a surrogate of scholarly impact: the Hirsch Index (Hirsch 2005). Journal rankings are a very important exercise in academia since they impact tenure and promotion decisions. Current methods employed to rank journal influence are shown to b...