Taking on sacred cows: openness, fair critique, and retaining value when revising classics

Most experienced authors know that getting papers through the revision process on the way to publication is challenging (Mingers, 2002), but fewer may have confronted the challenges of trying to significantly revise their works post publication. When required changes are small, they can easily be accommodated in a new paper that extends the earlier article and pushes forward in new directions. When an author feels the need for more substantial changes, however, a direct confrontation of the earlier work would seem to be in order. We have found that such substantial changes can be even more challenging than making a new contribution, particularly when the original paper has become a community classic. Our experience: 12 years ago, we took on a simple, straightforward project: Updating a classic paper – Markus and Robey (1988) – and putting it on a sounder philosophical and theoretical footing. Today, the paper has been accepted (Markus & Rowe, 2018, hereafter M&R18), but the project was by no means simple and straightforward, and the paper looks nothing like its early incarnations. As a result, the direct confrontation is missing from M&R18 (and we present it here). On our longerthan-expected journey to M&R18, we’ve learned some lessons about cumulative knowledge in our field, and we’d like to start a dialogue about them. Since EJIS prides itself on providing “critical view[s] on technology, development, implementation, strategy, management and policy,” it is only logical to initiate such a dialogue here.