AIS Chapters in Emerging Economies Drive IS Research Growth

One of the more interesting structural shifts in the global information systems research community over the past five years has been the rising importance of national AIS chapters in emerging and middle-income economies. The headline IS conferences — ICIS, ECIS, AMCIS, PACIS — continue to operate as the prestige venues, and they continue to be dominated, in terms of accepted papers and program committee composition, by institutions in North America, Western Europe, and Australasia. But a parallel layer has been growing underneath them: a network of national chapter symposia and workshops that increasingly serve as the primary venue for IS research from outside the established centers.

Two recent illustrations

Two events from the past eighteen months illustrate the pattern. In late November 2023, the Indonesian chapter AISINDO convened its first full-format annual symposium at Universitas Airlangga in Surabaya, drawing more than a hundred registered participants and running a substantive doctoral consortium alongside the main paper sessions. In early October 2024, the Bulgarian chapter BulAIS launched its inaugural international workshop on digital innovation at Sofia University, drawing more than seventy participants and pulling in contributions from across the Balkans and Western Europe.

Neither event is, by itself, a major node in the global IS conference calendar. But both share a structural significance that is easy to underestimate: they provide a stable, locally accessible annual venue where national and regional IS research communities can present work, train doctoral students, and develop the cumulative conversations that simply cannot happen when researchers have to wait for an irregular acceptance at a major flagship conference thousands of kilometers away.

Why chapter venues matter for emerging-economy IS

Several factors make the national chapter layer disproportionately important for IS research coming out of emerging economies. The most obvious is travel and visa friction: getting a graduate student from Surabaya, Sofia, Hanoi, or Lagos to ICIS in a North American city is expensive and bureaucratically slow, and the marginal benefit of one paper presentation at a flagship venue often does not justify the cost. A national chapter symposium with a credible doctoral consortium offers a much better return per dollar and per visa hour.

The second factor is methodological. Top-tier IS journals and conferences have, by necessity, methodological preferences that have been calibrated against research traditions in North American and Western European business schools. Work that is genuinely useful in emerging-economy contexts — design science studies of public administration informatics, qualitative cases of family-firm ERP adoption, applied security work on local financial infrastructure — does not always map cleanly onto those preferences, and a national chapter venue provides the editorial space to develop the work properly before, rather than instead of, attempting publication in the top venues.

The third factor is community continuity. National chapters create the conditions for repeat encounters across years between the same researchers, which is the underrated mechanism by which research conversations actually deepen.

The cumulative picture

If you sum across the AIS chapter ecosystem in 2024–25, the picture is striking. Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Malaysia each support an active national or regional venue with a doctoral consortium component. Bulgaria, Poland, Romania, and Serbia each support at least one structured IS workshop or conference at the national or regional level. Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa each host their own meetings, with varying degrees of formalization. Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia maintain active Latin American IS conferences with national chapter participation. India runs multiple substantial annual events.

None of these venues is competing with ICIS for prestige. That is not the point. The point is that the cumulative base of IS researchers and the cumulative volume of IS research being conducted, presented, and refined globally is now dominated by emerging-economy contexts — and the institutional infrastructure supporting that work is largely the national chapter layer.

"The interesting question is no longer whether emerging-economy IS scholarship matters. The interesting question is which national chapters will, over the next decade, successfully convert their annual venues into stable platforms that produce internationally visible cumulative output."

What to watch

Three indicators will matter over the next several years. First, whether national chapter events develop properly indexed, citable proceedings — a non-trivial step that determines whether the work presented at chapter venues becomes visible in international literature searches. Second, whether co-hosting and rotation arrangements emerge across neighbouring chapters, lowering the cost of regional integration. Third, whether senior international scholars increasingly treat chapter workshops as legitimate primary venues for engaged discussant work rather than as honorary keynote opportunities.

The first signs are positive on all three fronts. The chapter ecosystem is doing structural work that the flagship conferences cannot do — and the global IS research community is, slowly, beginning to recognize the fact.