The scholarly influence of Heinz Klein: ideational and social measures of his impact on IS research and IS scholars

Heinz Klein was a fine scholar and mentor whose work and life have inspired us to explore the notion of ‘scholarly influence’ which we cast as ‘ideational’ and ‘social influence’. We adopt a portfolio of measures approach, using the Hirsch family of statistics to assess ideational influence and Social Network Analysis centrality measures for social influence to profile Heinz Klein's contribution to information systems (IS) research. The results show that Heinz was highly influential in both ideational terms (a significant body of citations) and social terms (he is close to the heart of the IS research community). Reflecting on the major research themes and scholarly values espoused by Klein we define a ‘Kleinian view of IS research’, grounded in Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, and use that to frame four affirmative propositions to address what we observe to be a distortion and attenuation of the academic discourse on the evaluation of scholarly production. This paper argues that focus should be shifted from the venue of publication of the research to the uptake of the ideas contained in it, thus increasing the openness of the discourse, participation in the discourse, truthfulness, and reduction of the inequities in power distribution within academia.

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