Modernity

Ideas of modernity lie at the centre of contemporary social science and of the research and teaching in the department. We want to address concepts that are at the heart of modernity - the relation of people to technology, the local and the global, change and contested identities. This leads to critical approaches to taken-for-granted ideas such as management, strategy, alignment, and development, and counterposes them with such concepts as diversity, improvisation and hospitality.

We support a more existential, situated and contextually rich dialogue, one that questions and reshapes mainstream thought by drawing on social science theories. Our work, for example, is based on actor network theory, new institutionalism and new institutional economics, structurational approaches, theories of globalisation and risk, critical theory, and learning and systems approaches.

We believe our commitment to such approaches fosters innovation, creativity and debate in both research and practice. This philosophy underpins our work in each of the following petals, which by their very nature overlap and mutually inform.

Within the Information Systems Group, the social study of information and communication technologies (ICT) has six foci which we like to think of as the petals of a flower.

In the centre is modernity, and surrounding this are five domains of research interests:

• Artefacts
• Transactions
• Globality
• Organisation
• Agora and Demos

These names and themes each need a little explanation.

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