WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ADVISORS AND MENTORS? (24 June 2026)

Description

We have TC Eley IV on the show, a freshly minted assistant professor that just completed his PhD program. He is starting a new mentorship program for the AOM CTO Division, which marks a great opportunity to talk about supervision, advice, and mentoring in the IS field. Should mentors be collaborators on papers? Can you trust all advice you have been given? When does mentoring go bad? How do you pick a mentor or an advisor to begin with? Tune in to find out. And if our podcast triggered your interest to become a mentor for the AoM CTO Career Mentoring Program, send an e-mail to teley@villanova.edu with the subject “Interested in being a mentor for the AoM Career Mentoring Program.”

Episode Reading List

  • Berente, N., & Yoo, Y. (2012). Institutional Contradictions and Loose Coupling: Postimplementation of NASA’s Enterprise Information System. Information Systems Research,23(2), 376–396.
  • Glanze, E., Recker, J., & Bockelmann, T. (2026). Digital Sustainability with Physical Constraints: Insights from Twin Transformations in the German Manufacturing Industry. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, forthcoming.
  • Lehmann, J., Recker, J., Yoo, Y., & Rosenkranz, C. (2022). Designing Digital Market Offerings: How Digital Ventures Navigate the Tension Between Generative Digital Technology and the Existing Environment. MIS Quarterly,46(3), 1453–1482.
  • Recker, J. (2021). Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner’s Guide (2nd ed.). Springer.
  • Berente, N., Hansen, S., Pike, J. C., & Bateman, P. J. (2011). Arguing the Value of Virtual Worlds: Patterns of Discursive Sensemaking of an Innovative Technology. MIS Quarterly,35(3), 685–709.
  • AIS Doctoral Student College: https://communities.aisnet.org/doctoralstudentcollege/home.
  • Lee, J., & Berente, N. (2012). Digital Innovation and the Division of Innovative Labor: Digital Controls in the Automotive Industry. Organization Science,23(5), 1428–1447.
  • Schecter, A., Pilny, A., Leung, A., Poole, M. S., & Contractor, N. (2018). Step by step: Capturing the Dynamics of Work Team Process Through Relational Event Sequences. Journal of Organizational Behavior,39(9), 1163–1181.
  • Lehmann, J., Berends, H., Berente, N., & Tumbas, S. (2026). Architectural Learning in the Professional 3D Printing Ecosystem: Proxies and the Complementarity Space. Organization Science,37(1), 157–185.
  • Lehmann, J., Hukal, P., Recker, J., & Tumbas, S. (2025). Layering the Architecture of Digital Product Innovations: Firmware and Adapter Layers. Journal of the Association for Information Systems,26(6), 1630–1650.
  • AIS Senior Scholar Mentoring Program: https://archives.aisconferences.org/icis2022/mentoring-program/index.html.
  • AIS Women’s Network College: https://www.aiswn.org/.
  • Canadian Chapter of the Association for Information Systems Mentorship Program: https://communities.aisnet.org/canada-thrive/mentor.
  • AIS SIG DITE Early Career Mentorship Program: https://communities.aisnet.org/sigdite/early-career-mentorship-program.

The Home Page of Professor Jan Recker