I believe that there is always a political component in almost organizations but it is only one of factors that affect publication. The quality of research is a key determination to get published.

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Despite the rigor there is undoubtedly a political component.  There always is.  So, the glad-handing is a way of not offending anyone who might be helpful or useful at a later time.   At least there's no reason to create enemies where none need to exist.

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I found the three editorials a very interesting set of documents. They are a great tie back to the first couple sessions of class. These memos represent many different things to me: 1.) These editors want to send a message about how they plan on running the journal, just as an inauguration speech from a President at the beginning of his term wants to set the tone. 2.) They are also setting up some rules and provide some insight into what it will take to get published in their journal. 3.) It again impresses the fact that the collection of authors, reviewers, and editors of this journal and the others are THE authorities and credibility watchers of our field. 3.) At least in these three memos, there is a fair share of glad-handing. There seems to be a lot of mutual admiration going on. 4.) That being said, they are very serious about their job. There are no free passes into the Quarterly. Rigor, scrutiny, and validity are not taken lightly.

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Bock et al. bring together what I think some of us were hoping to see in the Pawlowski and Robey article. First, this article was actually based on theory, to be exactly the theory of reasoned action (TRA). From what I have gathered in a short lookup in addition to is description of the reading, TRA's purpose is to show that a person's intention is the product of his/her attitude towards a behavior and the norms associated with the behavior. Second, this article has emperical substance that crosses organizational, industy, genders, and functions.

I appreciated the fact that they acknowledge that still more rigorous resear needs to be done, and I don't disagree. There were of course some limiting factors, particularly with regards to the staying in the same culture with such strong nationalistic links.

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Ok.  I'm not feeling so bad any more.  Two of the people I respect the most (of course, I have tremendous respect for all of my classmates;-) are looking up words in our readings.  I'm doing the same thing.  There's so much that I have little or no clue about, that I spend hours on the Wikipedia pages just trying to figure some of it out! 

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I think that somehow the study could have been more rigourously designed to inlcuded quantitative analysis as well.  If the authors had as much access as they did, they might have also wanted to do direct observational analysis to supplement the questionairres (I think this might have reduced bias from the surveys only being from all but 1 IT professional).

 

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I don't think you need to apologize. I think most of us have had things come up that lead us to be behind in our postings and readings.  Hope all is better with your family.

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I agree that this is a very interesting book and is different from what we have read in our journals and other texts, but has way too many words to look up.  I think I stopped after heuristic, just so I could try to stay with the flow of the book.  Our journals are even worse.  Not only do they use specialized terminology without explanation, but the don't explain the statistics either.  I recognize a few words from the GRE test, but not most of them. 

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I am though the first 50 pages (chapters 1 & 2) and I finding it very hard to get going. Books that make me continuously look up lots of words in the dictionary to get their meaning really slows down my comprehension. It also takes away from my enjoyment of learning what they are trying to teach me. Boy, I just wanted to get that off my chest. I have felt this a few times this semester, but I really appreciate that I am being stretched and learning new so many new concepts. There is so much to learn from the material in this class; it would help if they used straightforward English. Drucker was the master of the simplification of language. He was amazingly profound and did not need to use any extraneous pontification or wordsmithery to make his work credible.

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Pawlowski & Robey provide a very interesting study on knowledge brokering. This qualitative study brought to light many of the conditions that occur in the real world IT department in a large multi-location corporation. The IT staff does control (and many times hoard) the critical information that revolves around their IT resources and capabilities. My sense is that much of this has to do with fear of replacement or job security.

I would be very interested to see if other research has come about as a result of this article. I am going to have to see the tool Kim used to see how many times this article was cited. I would like to see this research extended to breakdown the different roles within an organization to see how and how much certain job titles broker their knowledge and what affects their behaviors have on the IT and business performance. This is also a potential link into the organizational learning research that could draw on this line of research.

While reading this article I was continually looking for how I would take this research to the next step. What would make this valuable if it was changed to a quantitative study. What elements would be important to quantify? I am certainly looking at these articles differently than I did at the start of the semester.

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