MIS Quarterly, 1999, Volume 23,
Issue 1, Page 19-23.
Assistant Professor Marilyn Moore reread the rejection letter from a top tier MIS journal and then added it to the folder containing the letter she had received from another top MIS journal. Moore had graduated from Barker University one year before (June 1996) with a Ph.D. in business administration, majoring in management information systems and decision sciences. She had returned for her Ph.D. in 1992 at the age of 30, driven by her love of teaching and a desire to solve the problems she had seen in the eight years she had worked at a Fortune 100 consumer products firm. While at the firm, Moore had risen from a programmer to a senior systems analyst and had spent three years working with the firm's corporate training unit. With her tenure clock ticking, Moore returned to the firm she had worked for prior to entering the Ph.D. program. The firm again expressed interest in having her conduct research on IT-enabled organizational change. She sought help from senior faculty in her area to help her design the research project; her doctoral program had not addressed how to design complex, qualitative case-based research. Once again she was discouraged from pursuing this line of 'messy field research.' Although none of the faculty had conducted field-based case research, they were well aware of the problems with designing a study that adequately operationalized and controlled the variables and relationships of interest. They also pointed out that she might run into the same criticisms of the lack of generalizability of her findings since she was only planning to study one firm. In addition, they knew that field research took time and were concerned that Moore would not have a sufficient number of refereed publications to pass both school of business and university tenure hurdles.