IRIS Conference Health Check. Traditions, tensions, and reformations

Abstract

Regional conferences support researchers to network in a cost-efficient way. Quite often, such conferences become tight communities where friends and colleagues meet and share ideas regularly, year after year. However, with increasing public interest towards universities and the ideology of private-public management, deans and other managers have started to urge for high-quality scientific impact. Under the circumstances, regional conferences, with limited publication opportunities and lesser worldwide visibility among academics, have begun to lose their status as an important venue for science and networking. It is equally easy and cheap to travel and attend more prestigious venues. In this paper, we analyze the main conference of the Scandinavian Chapter of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), aka IRIS association, namely IRIS, Information Systems Research Seminar in Scandinavia. We aim to understand what makes regional conferences (and chapters) sustainable. Our argumentation is based on two empirical studies; an analysis of the IRIS participants between 2011-2019 and a survey among senior scholars in the region.