Anurag Jain's Blog
Tuesday, August 24, 2004

Email: A researchable domain

In the latest issue of MIS Quarterly (MIS Quarterly Vol. 28 No. 3, pp. iii-xiii/September 2004), Editor-in-Chief Ron Weber sort of issues a call to the MIS professionals to see email as a researchable domain. Even from a non-research perspective, the edit makes a good read on typical email behaviours! Coming from the editor of such a reputed IS journal, it seems like a good topic to do IS research on.

Some samples from the edit:
..In short, we have human, technological,and in some cases organizational problems to solve.
.. In this editorial I have taken a somewhat jaundiced view of e-mail. I have done so purposefully to try to show that e-mail phenomena provide a rich lode to mine for research purposes.
..Curiously, we have little published research about e-mail in our major information systems journals,2 even though for many of us it represents perhaps the most-significant computer application we use.
.. In this light, I hope to motivate more high-quality research and more high-quality publications on e-mail.
.. I believe technological developments associated with e-mail use therefore need to be informed by social science research.
.. Nonetheless, many of us claim that as members of the information systems discipline we are well placed to study phenomena associated with human-computer interactions.

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