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The Sociotechnical Axis of Cohesion for the IS Discipline: Its Historical Legacy and Its Continued Relevance

Summary

Sarker et al. argue that the sociotechnical axis — the mutual constitution of social and technical elements in information systems — has been and should remain the core organizing principle of the IS discipline. They trace its intellectual history (Tavistock Institute, Mumford, ETHICS, Bostrom and Heinen) through to its contemporary embodiments, and use it to defend IS against disciplinary disintegration into pure technology research on one side and pure managerial/organizational research on the other.

Contribution

A canonical statement of what the IS discipline is about in 2019. By positioning sociotechnical-ness as the discipline's defining commitment, the paper provides a yardstick against which IS-relevant work — including agentic-research systems — can be evaluated for fit.

Method

Historical and conceptual analysis. Reviews the genealogy of sociotechnical thinking in IS, identifies recurring themes, and argues for continued centrality.

Relevance to RISE

If RISE is to be claimed as an IS subfield (as this knowledge base proposes), Sarker et al.'s yardstick applies: a RISE contribution must engage the mutual constitution of social and technical elements, not merely build a tool. The catalog's evaluation rubric reflects this — autonomy_level, human_in_loop, and the narrative positioning fields all push contributors to articulate the human side of the system, not just the architecture. Sarker et al. give the methodological warrant for that emphasis.

Critique / open questions

  • The paper predates LLMs; it does not directly address the case where the "technical" element exhibits emergent quasi-social behavior (agentic systems, anthropomorphic interfaces — cf. 1).
  • The defense of the sociotechnical axis is partly disciplinary politics; readers outside IS may find the prescriptive claims less binding.

  1. Peter, S., Riemer, K., & West, J. D. (2025). The benefits and dangers of anthropomorphic conversational agents. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(22), e2415898122. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2415898122 ↩