I am a behavioral IS researcher whose research interests focus largely on the relationship of IT artifacts and organizations. These interests thus include investigations of the nature of the IT artifact and its ability to interact with people and participate in social structures as well as the factors that affect how the artifact came to be structured as it is and implemented in an organization as it is. Another area of research interest is that of the evaluation of scholarly productivity.

My interest in this area began with an inquiry begun as a Masters program readings course into why change initiatives (such as organization change or IS implementation) succeed or fail. In this area, I first investigated the impact of absorptive capacity on the ability of an organization to change to accommodate the information system. This research resulted in a publication in the European Journal of Operational Research (Cuellar and Gallivan 2006) in which I proposed a method of assessing the risk of implementation failure based on absorptive capacity which included a “quick and dirty” evaluation metric for assessing the absorptive capacity of an organization and then demonstrated its usefulness by evaluating five different projects.

Subsequent to the development of that paper, I sought to move that study forward using knowledge management concepts. I began by attempting to investigate the relationship between information systems and organizations based on organizational knowledge concepts on which to base a further investigation of how information systems become implemented in organizations. This resulted in a conference paper (Cuellar and Johnson 2005). At that point, I discovered Critical Realism (Bhaskar 1997; Mingers 2004) and began to investigate what it teaches. I soon discovered Archer’s Morphogenetic Approach (Archer 1995) and began to apply it to IS. I have proposed an extension to Archer’s theory to specifically account for information systems (Cuellar 2007) and later how to explain project outcomes (Cuellar 2010). I am now in the process of developing a paper that uses critical realist principles to re-conceptualize the IT artifact. This paper has been the subject of several conference papers and presentations and has previously been under review at Information and Organization. I am now revising it to be submitted to the MIS Quarterly Special Issue on Critical Realism this fall (Cuellar Under Revision). I recently (March, 2011) presented this line of research to the faculty of Georgia State University in a research colloquium. I have an invitation to teach a doctoral seminar on Critical Realism to Mid-Sweden University this fall.

With Mark Keil, Roman Beck and others, I am involved in a study of the deaf effect response to bad news reporting in Information Systems Projects (why leaders don’,br>;t hear, ignore or reject reports of bad news) leading the failure of projects to be implemented. In this stream of research, I have used laboratory experiments, case studies, and cross-cultural analyses to explore this phenomenon. The deaf effect is an understudied area. My contribution has been to develop an individual level model of how the effect occurs and test it in laboratory experiments. This has resulted in two conference papers (Cuellar, Keil and Johnson 2006b; Cuellar, Keil, Johnson, Beck, Liu and Pretorius 2007) and a journal article (Cuellar, Keil and Johnson 2006a). As part of my dissertation research, I have investigated the effects of societal culture on the deaf effect by repeating the experiment in five countries. I also completed a field study of a project status reporting system in a public sector IS organization to investigate the effects of organizational structures and climate on the occurrence of the deaf effect. We have a paper under first round revision at DATABASE.

A research group in which I work with Duane Truex, Richard Vidgen and Hiro Takeda seeks to develop an improved method to evaluate scholars’ intellectual contributions. This line of research began with a conference to honor the late Heinz Klein in 2007. From that conference, we developed a stream of work that resulted in four conference papers (Cuellar, Takeda and Truex 2008; Takeda and Cuellar 2008; Takeda, Truex III and Cuellar 2010; Truex III, Cuellar and Takeda 2008) and three journal publications including papers in the Journal of the Association of Information Systems (JAIS) and the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) (Takeda, Truex III and Cuellar 2011; Truex III, Cuellar and Takeda 2009; Truex III, Cuellar, Takeda and Vidgen 2011). In these papers, we show that the existing methodology for evaluating intellectual contributions is a biased and untrustworthy evaluation mechanism for scholarly output. We proposed that the Hirsch family of indices be adopted for this purpose. We have recently expanded this work to add the impact of social networks on scholarly influence (Takeda, Truex III, Cuellar and Vidgen 2011) and the evaluation of journal influence using this methodology (Cuellar, Takeda, Truex III and Vidgen Under Review). Future work here involves a paper to be submitted to the MIS Quarterly Special Issue on Critical Realism, which includes the first theory of intellectual contribution quality and how it is formed. This paper also involves perhaps the largest bibliometric database of IS publications yet created. This paper incorporates the Critical Realist methodology discussed above. Additional work in this area includes a paper providing a general critique of the existing scholarly evaluation methodology from a Habermassian perspective presented at The Seventh International Critical Management Studies Conference (Truex III, Cuellar, Vidgen and Takeda 2011) which is being fast-tracked to JAIS. I also have an invitation from John Mingers to present this research at University of Kent this fall.

I have employed a broad range of research methods. My dissertation research included both laboratory experiments and a theory-building case study. In other research, I have used secondary case studies, author-co-citation analysis, and content analysis. I have also had training in action research and Soft Systems Methodology. I believe that using multiple methods allows me to triangulate on the actual state of affairs and thus identify and mitigate single method biases.