Study Examines How Aesthetic Perspectives Shape Information Systems Research
A hermeneutic literature analysis published on arXiv identifies four aesthetic perspectives — imitation, sensory experience, world-making, and political doing — that implicitly govern what Information Systems scholarship recognizes as legitimate inquiry. The paper, accepted for the 2026 European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), argues these aesthetic assumptions function as 'epistemic infrastructure' that expands or limits research horizons. The work matters because it offers IS scholars a new vocabulary for critically examining how unexamined aesthetic commitments shape theory, method, and the boundaries of the field.
Researchers have published a hermeneutic literature analysis arguing that implicit aesthetic assumptions profoundly influence what Information Systems (IS) scholarship treats as worthy of study. The paper identifies four foundational aesthetic perspectives: aesthetics as imitation, as sensory experience, as world-making, and as political doing. Each perspective, the authors contend, conditions what sociotechnical phenomena become visible and legitimate within IS research and what remains overlooked. To demonstrate the framework's utility, the authors apply it to two contemporary domains — algorithmic management and digitally mediated intimacy — showing how alternative aesthetic lenses open new research questions that dominant framings miss. The paper frames these aesthetic assumptions as forming an 'epistemic infrastructure,' a largely invisible scaffolding that shapes theorising and methodological choices across the field. Accepted for presentation at the Thirty-Fourth European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2026) in Milan, the work aims to introduce aesthetic philosophy as a productive resource for IS scholars. The authors argue that making these assumptions explicit is a prerequisite for broadening the field's intellectual horizons.
What's missing
As a conceptual/hermeneutic paper, the study does not employ empirical data collection or hypothesis testing, which limits its falsifiability. The paper's own scope is bounded by the IS literature it selected for analysis, and the authors do not detail their corpus selection criteria in the abstract, leaving open questions about coverage and potential selection bias in which works were interpreted.
What different sources said
- arXiv cs.AICenter
Aesthetic Perspectives in Information Systems Research: A Hermeneutic Analysis
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