The Crisis of Relevance and the Relevance of Crisis: Renegotiating Critique in Information Systems Scholarship

Information systems as a discipline has recently been under pressure to justify its existence as a core subject within the management curriculum. There has also been recent pressure about the relevance of the IS research agenda. These are pressures felt at the more general level of business education as well, and calls have been made for business scholars to take a more holistic approach to scholarship as well as to make more explicit links to the practice of business. We take the position in this paper that the pressures can be addressed in one way by renegotiating the notion of scholarly critique. Specifically, we reconnect the idea of critique to that of crisis and attempt to show how crisis has the potential to reengage the IS scholar with praxis and help bring the often disparate projects of research, teaching, and consulting into an integrated scholarly enterprise.