[AISWorld] CfP: Knowing What We Know: Theory, Meta-analysis and Review -- HICSS-52

[Dirk Hovorka]

Call for Papers: HICSS-52 in beautiful Maui, HI!

Minitrack: Knowing What We Know: Theory, Meta-analysis and Review
(Organizational Systems and Technology track)

8-11 January, 2019
Grand Wailea Maui
http://hicss.hawaii.edu<http://hicss.hawaii.edu/>

Minitrack Chairs: Dirk Hovorka and Kai Larsen

The "Knowing What We Know: Theory and Review" mini-track invites submissions that pursue approaches, methods and conceptual papers which will advance the IS field ability to "know what it knows". Our ability to understand, integrate and synthesize the exponentially growing body of scientific literature in the social sciences is hampered by both structural and social problems. These include a lack of standardization for concepts and constructs across the fields and a lack of infrastructure and powerful search and integration tools which would enable researchers to perform meta-theorization. The aim of this mini-track is to engage the disciplinary infrastructures other fields have successfully progressed (e.g. metaBUS, the Human Behavior Project, Medline and the Biological Science Database) that will enable IS to better know what we know.

Research over the last decades has emphasized theory development in IS and other social and behavioral science disciplines.  The resulting proliferation of theories and constructs has numerous redundancies, which can be revealed through review, meta-theorization/meta-analysis and interrogation of the theory discourse.   Theory ontologies would benefit the disciplines by identifying what we can now research given what we already know.  Theory synthesis or integration will inform social and behavioral sciences research with a better understanding of fundamental theories, help organize our theories to be accessible to practice, and increase our understanding of the philosophical commitments represented in their contextualization and use.

The scope of the papers for the mini-track is quite broad, including for example, the development of theory ontologies, approaches to theory integration, and meta-analytic/review approaches to building cumulative theory. We also welcome approaches to the local contextualization of theory where insight is gained into valuable distinctions.

Toward these ends, topics of interest in this mini-track include:

1.    Approaches to theory meta-analysis, integration or aggregation of social and behavioral science theories;

2.    The theoretical ties between different disciplines (e.g. healthcare and IS, and sustainability science and IS, energy informatics), or parallel the trends in theorizing the same phenomenon;

3.    Research on ontologies, taxonomies, frameworks, and categorizations of constructs and variables used in system science theories;

4.    Conceptual papers on an Social Science Infrastructure that would support social sciences

5.    Techniques for the extraction of constructs and relationships from published papers

6.    The use of natural language processing, data mining, and predictive analytics to better understand and interrogate theories;

7.    Discussion of the roles of theories used to explain, approaches used to predict (e.g. neural nets and big data), and of theories of understanding;

8.    Exploration of the dependencies of constructs and variables;

9.    Exploration of the boundaries of theory "domains."

This mini-track also has an associated ISWorld website devoted to theories used in IS research (http://istheory.byu.edu/wiki/Main_Page) - which won the 2005 AISWorldNet Challenge Award for the best website based on AISWorldNet user voting.  We intend to uphold this high standard and advance the website further by increasing the synergy between mini-track outcomes and website content.

For further conference details, schedules and submission guidelines please see:
http://www.hicss.org/

HICSS Author Guidelines: http://hicss.hawaii.edu/tracks-and-minitracks/authors/

We hope to see you in Hawaii in January 2019!

Mini-track Co-Chairs:

Dirk S. Hovorka
Associate Professor
University of Sydney Business School
University of Sydney
New South Wales, AU
dirk.hovorka at sydney.edu.au<mailto:dirk.hovorka at sydney.edu.au>

Kai R. Larsen
Associate Professor
Leeds School of Business
University of Colorado
Boulder, Colorado
kai.larsen at colorado.edu<mailto:kai.larsen at colorado.edu>