A seminar to celebrate Leaving Tower One

Good Sociologists and Innovative Technologists or Real Amateurs:
what does IS have to offer?

A discussion led by

Jannis Kallinikos and Carsten Sorensen
ISIG, LSE

8 July 2008

• Read the Carsten Sorensen's presentation

Discuss this video on the ISIG discussion blog

This summer ISIG moves from Tower One and Studio Ciborra to the new Department of Management Building. We have been in Tower One for seven years, from 9/11 to the credit crunch; during our time here we have developed new and important research streams in the physical and intellectual space imagined by Claudio Ciborra.

Information Systems as a field of study exists between, and beyond, sociological and technological approaches to the world; either optimistically creating news ways of understanding a digital world or, pessimistically, falling between two stools.

Jannis Kallinikos and Carsten Sorensen will present two views of this synthesis from their contrasting histories to open a discussion of the extent and limits of our contribution – to explore whether we are professionals or amateurs: amateurs in either the English sense of bunglers or the French sense of expert lovers of a subject.

Key patterns of life that have been established over large historical periods are currently changing in ways that are rather unusual and not always easily comprehended. Despite the institutional inertia embedded in our societies, it seems as though the humble means of information, originally intended as a descriptive instrument, is able to drive a number of far reaching institutional and personal changes. Information is a cognitive not a technological category and the significance information assumes in contemporary life reflects the primacy of representation over reality, a key societal orientation that became deeply embedded in modernity. Riding on the powerful technology of computation, information has become centrally involved in a variety of practices that reshuffle and reassemble key units/entities of the world we live from the document/file, through the focal character of experience and the accountable human agent to institutional entities such as formal organizations and governments. Whether trivialized, downplayed or simply ignored, things are and will look even more different in the future.

Most of the computer science community trivialises the understanding of the social adaptation of systems and services. Conversely, social scientists tend to focus on social adaptation, with little direct appreciation for the dynamics of specific technological choices. Where do we find the unique contributions beyond the socio-technical twilight zone only generally accepted within our own field (and in neighbouring fields of HCI and CSCW)? When our unit of analysis was one organisation with one mainframe spitting out reports and invoices it was less problematic to explain our uniqueness to others. Now ICT forms an integral part of everyday personal and organisational life for most people, the field of IS runs the danger of becoming irrelevant as the phenomena associated no longer are clearly defined and separated from other human activities. For me the answer is to emphasise that which brings us all together - technology. Whilst it on its own often will be the least important aspect of most practical problems, it forms the core of what we do. As IS researchers we must be able to understand contemporary technological challenges as experienced by individuals, groups, organisations or societies. Our contribution to the understanding of ICT in contemporary life can not merely be the social study of a technology but must also be comprised of the technological study of society. It is, therefore, far from sufficient to know all the latest social theories. Others look to us to help with theories making sense of the latest technological reality.

page last updated 18 March, 2009

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