Editorial appreciating alien thinking
这篇社论以匈牙利外交官的格言为引，探讨了学术编辑、作者和审稿人如何以开放心态理解与自己截然不同的思维方式，并介绍了本期三篇信息系统研究论文。
The Hungarian diplomat, Miklós Bánffy wrote: ‘one of the most important assets of a diplomat is the ability to understand a way of thinking quite alien to one's own’ (Bánffy, 1945, 2003, p. 365). As an editor, I find this to be a remarkably simple yet important message that all of us involved in the global research process would do well to bear in mind, particularly as we otherwise tend to the maxim ‘we don't see things as they are; we see them as we are’. 1 As authors, we need to remember that we rarely write purely for ourselves, but rather for an audience. We may fondly imagine that we are not alien to them, nor they to us. We may further assume that the audience is broadly interested in what we are writing, indeed, that it hopes to learn from our research, but we don't need to make it unnecessarily difficult for the audience to grasp the essentials of our message. This is why it is always a good idea to get your colleagues to read a paper prior to submission; if they can't follow your arguments, it is likely that others can't either. For the same reason, it is important that you write your article for a specific journal and its audience. While some IS journals may appreciate mathematical equations, others may not. Some may allow you to submit a 15 000-word monologue, but others would prefer that you restrain your loquacity and submit no more than 6000 words. Make sure that you read (a) some recently published papers in your target journal, and (b) the submission guidelines, before you submit. As an editor, I all too frequently read papers that encapsulate ways of thinking entirely alien to my own. This is in part the nature of the job, in part the nature of my background. Editors cannot be experts in everything. Nevertheless, it would be entirely inappropriate for me to judge these ‘alien’ papers solely based on my own perspectives, which may be just as alien to the authors as are theirs to me. In consequence, editors must be broad minded. It does not mean that they have to believe or value everything that they see, nor that they must accept all papers submitted, but it does mean that they cannot indulge in a myopic or blinkered vision: all research perspectives are equally valid; research should be assessed in its own context; editors have the responsibility of helping the author build on his/her potential to achieve the best possible outcome in the circumstances, but not pushing the author to write the editor's paper. As Bánffy (1945, 2003) implies, the editor must try to see the world through the author's eyes. These remarks do not preclude any editorial outcome (accept, revise, reject), but do mean that an outcome must be justified without thrall to the editor's personal perspectives. Although, as editor, I do screen papers out (i.e. without review) occasionally (usually on the grounds of poor fit), I more commonly seek an opinion from a senior editor (SE) so that at least two people have seen a paper before a decision is reached. In this spirit, I have consulted several colleagues (both inside and outside the ISJ – see acknowledgements) with respect to the text of this editorial and incorporated their feedback so as to ensure that my own biases are minimised or at least rendered transparent. I intend to continue doing this for all future editorials that I write at the ISJ. As reviewers, and here I refer to SEs and associate editors (AEs) as well, the need to approach alien thinking with an open mind is all the more important, given the authority members of the review team have to reach a recommendation on a submitted paper. Lee's (1995) advice on manuscript reviewing is especially valuable here (see also Davison et al., 2005; Davison, 2013, 2015). It is inevitable that different people will have different points of view, different preferences and different perspectives. I see this most frequently in split reviews, where one member of the review team is adamant that a paper should not be published, often for cogent reasons and supported by trenchant analysis; at the same time, another member may take a diametrically opposed view, for equally well-argued reasons. This state is not one that can be resolved democratically. Reviewer recommendations are not binding on AEs and SEs, though I know many AEs and SEs are reluctant to overturn reviewer recommendations. This is why it is important that the AE/SE has her/his own view of a paper, ideally acquired not only by reading the reviews themselves, but also by reading the paper. AEs/SEs need to trust their intuition, even as they are mindful of their preferences. AEs/SEs do not have quotas for acceptances/rejections at the ISJ: I strongly believe that we are in the business of publishing and that all good research should be published. I do not have an agreed acceptance rate from the publisher (Wiley), nor has anyone ever suggested that we should restrict what we publish to (or below) a fixed % of submissions. Over the last few years, our acceptance rate has been rising, and for 2016, of 213 final decisions reached, 28 were acceptances (13.15%). It is one of the joys of IS research that we are so broad minded as a discipline that we can encounter such a variety of topic matter, theory, methodology and epistemology under a single disciplinary roof. To keep it this way, and to return to Bánffy, we need to appreciate ways of understanding quite alien to our own, yet recognise that they too have value, no matter how strange, how bizarre, they may seem to be, if only we can open our eyes wide enough to appreciate them and see the world as others see it, not only as we see it. We present three papers in this issue of the ISJ, each of which presents the world in a different way, yet also each of which makes a unique and valuable contribution to knowledge. In the first paper, ‘A typology of user liability to IT addiction’, which was originally submitted to the Special Issue on the Dark Side of IT, Isaac Vaghefi, Liette Lapointe and Camille Boudreau-Pinsonneault (Vaghefi et al. 2017) examine an important area of the dark side of IT use, i.e. the susceptibility of individuals to develop IT addiction. In light of the dramatic increase in technology usage, the authors explore the liability of smartphone users to develop excessive and problematic forms of IT usage. Employing a mixed-method approach, the authors propose a typological theory that models five types of users (addict, fanatic, highly engaged, regular and thoughtful) and explain their respective liability to addiction. Each user profile was found to have distinguished usage behaviours with the addict and fanatic types showing the most serious signs of pathological use. Based on these findings, the authors advance five propositions that allow the identification of the unique characteristics of each type. The practical implications of the paper include specific strategies to effectively detect user liability to addiction and practical guidelines to encourage or discourage different forms of usage. In the second paper, ‘Service encounter thinklets: how to empower service agents to put value co-creation into practice’, Tobias Giesbrecht, Gerhard Schwabe and Birgit Schenk (Giesbrecht et al., 2017) research the concept of value co-creation, focusing on the physical service encounters between service agents and their clients as the locus of this value co-creation. The authors highlight the implication of previous value co-creation research on creating a collaborative environment in IT-supported service encounters between human service agents and clients. Using collaboration engineering constructs, they introduce the concept of service encounter thinklets (SETs) to empower service agents to put value co-creation into practice. Real-world tests with employees in a public administration's front office provide initial evidence that SETs can effectively enable service agents to bring together themselves, clients and supporting information systems, forming a collaborative environment where the service's value is truly co-created. In the third paper, ‘Digitally enabled disaster response: the emergence of social media as boundary objects in a flooding disaster’, Yenni Tim, Shan L. Pan, Peter Ractham and Laddawan Kaewkitipong (Tim et al., 2017) explore the increasingly prominent role of social media in the overcoming of societal challenges. The authors undertake an in-depth case study into a serious flooding disaster in Thailand to illustrate how social media plays an enabling role in bottom-up disaster response actions. The authors shed light on how social media could be usefully incorporated as boundary objects, thereby supporting the provision of critical humanitarian assistance during a disaster. Through an analysis of interviews, focus group discussions and postings on social networking sites, the authors reveal the adaptability of social media in serving as three different types of boundary objects and establish how these boundary objects could be enacted to facilitate cross-boundary response actions. The findings from this study enhance our understanding of the important yet under-researched roles of social media in disaster response, and more generally on the enabling power of emerging technologies in overcoming previously intractable societal challenges. I am grateful to Allen Lee and Monideepa Tarafdar for their feedback on an earlier version of this editorial.