Research paradigms and topics in Enterprise Engineering analysis of recent conferences and workshops

Enterprise Engineering (EE) is about purposeful design of enterprises and their transformative activities. It is an interdisciplinary domain, which draws largely on information systems and organizational science. Not unlike these fields, EE would benefit from a variety of research approaches to study the engineering of socio-technical systems. To analyze the prevalence of different research paradigms and the composition of research topics in the EE field, we examined 115 research papers in the field as presented in four pertinent conferences in 2009–2013: the Practice-Driven Research on Enterprise Transformation (PRET), Enterprise Engineering Working Conference (EEWC) as well as relevant tracks in the Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems (MCIS) and in the European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS). As per this analysis, the social aspect seems to be under-investigated and the interpretive paradigm under-represented in the EE research, while there seems to be a bias towards technical focus and the functionalist paradigm. The analysis ascertained the need for further evolvement of the EE discipline through more attention to social aspects and a more balanced variety of research approaches. We view that this will balance the course of advancing EE theories with the integration of gathered insights. With this paper, we want to instill a debate on the need for alternative research paradigms and for research on social aspects in the field of EE.