The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems

Citation

Cawkell, T. (2002), "The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 6, pp. 699-700. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2002.58.6.699.2

Why shouldn’t the kind of books reviewed in this publication look attractive? In contrast it to the many books which I receive, this book has a dust cover with a beautifully reproduced version in colour of The Musicians by Caravaggio. I cannot work out how this painting relates to the content of the book – but who cares? I knew the book would be interesting.

Claudio Ciborra is professor of information systems at the London School of Economics. He started life as an electronics engineer . He says in this book:

… it is written by a person who has neither an expert level education nor experience of participation in programming and systems development, and who has never been a manager.

In it he unveils:

… the dark side of information systems, or to put a different focus on the obvious, the workaday, and the very well known to any practitioner in the field. Activities such as hacking, improvising, tinkering, applying patches, and cutting corners seem to punctuate ubiquitously the everyday life of systems.

A fellow professor at the LSE thinks that the book “is a tour de force that propels information systems into the heart of the Social Sciences”.

In the introduction, Ciborra suggests that the “information systems field, with its rational views of knowledge, decision making, strategy, and orderly development, is based on a narrow model of rational, ideal actors”. He then proceeds to show that it is not. The German philosopher Georg Hegel said:

In philosophy we are concerned not with what belongs exclusively to the past or future but with that which is now and eternally – in short, with reason.

Ciborra’s book is concerned with two branches of philosophy – metaphysics, or the theory of reality, and epistemology, the theory of knowledge. However it covers rather more practical matters than these. “Understanding” claims Ciborra “is grounded on the human attitude of being open to possibilities and continuous caring about events, resources, behaviours and problems …”, such an attitude is the engine behind these informal practices, referred to as bricolage. Bricolage is a French word meaning pottering or improvising and is used to describe the content of a chapter. Oher words used for chapter headings include Gestell, meaning “enframing”, Xenia, “a friend of the stranger”, and “Kairos” which might be translated as “opportune” I am pleased to say that my Greek education was neglected so I had to look up words in Greek.

In the Kairos chapter under the heading “improvising as a mood”, the author cites a classic case of vital improvisation during a disaster when the captain of a fire‐fighting team rescued himself when most of the rest of the team died in a sudden forest fire. He burned the high grass in front of him. “When the wall of the main fire, blown by the wind, arrived, it passed over him because he had created a clearing in which the fire could not find grass for fuel”.

This entertaining book is described by the author as “an attempt at redefining the agenda of information systems design, development, and management”. Professor Nonaka, an authority I cited in an earlier ARIST review of this book says, simply, “An excellent book”.