The concept or event when the accepted norms, reference points and standards (the “baseline”) of a system is gradually lowered.
Environmental / Ecological
The concept may first be found in Ian McHarg’s 1969 manifesto Design With Nature , in which the modern landscape is compared to the landscape on which ancient people once lived. The concept was also used by Daniel Pauly applied to fisheries management, and Paul Dayton to describe the ecology of kelp forests. The latter used a different version of the term in their paper, “sliding baselines,” but both terms refer to a shift over time in the expectation of what a healthy ecosystem baseline looks like.
Political
Philippine writer Regine Cabato in a public Facebook post applied it to a Philippine law and politics, saying “Lawmakers should be ashamed of their cowardice and their perpetuation of a moving baseline for corruption.” (Emphasis mine.)
Information systems
Researchers Robert Davison and Monideepa Tarafdar applied it to shifts in information science, and considered it a threat to the future of the field.^[Davison, R. M., & Tarafdar, M. (2018). Shifting baselines in Information Systems Research Threaten our future relevance. Information Systems Journal, 28(4), 587–591. https://doi.org/10.1111/isj.12197] ^[Davison, R. M., & Tarafdar, M. (2018). Shifting baselines in Information Systems Research Threaten our future relevance.pdf]
Shifting Baseline Theory (Ortmann, 2010; Pauly, 1995) suggests that the baseline research for any discipline shifts over time as new topics of significance and interest emerge and as successive generations of researchers bring in new ideas, new techniques and study new phenomena. However, the shifts we lay out in this editorial are threatening to redefine what IS research is, making this an existential issue that affects us all
Management
G. Ortmann applied it to the context of organizational management, where organizations:
[…] re-impregnate memory in a selective manner. The organization’s members and, in a sense, the organizations themselves forget selectively on the basis of their objectives, programs, rules, resources, culture, and practices. ^[Ortmann, G. (2010). On drifting rules and standards. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 26(2), 204–214. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman.2010.02.004] ^[Ortmann, G. (2010). On drifting rules and standards..pdf]
He blames this on three potential things: forgetfulness or ignorance, a shift in informal standards, and the “slowness and imperceptibility of sliding, gradual developments. In the beginning, one cannot see the changes.”
As one generation replaces another, people’s perspectives change such that they fail to appreciate the extent of past environmental modifications by humanity.^[Sa´enz-Arroyo, A., Robert, C. M., Torre, J., Carin˜o-Olvera, M., & Enrı´quez-Andrade, R. R. (2005). Rapidly shifting environmental baselines among fishers of the Gulf of C]