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The purpose of this paper is to explore a particular philosophical underpinning for Information Systems (IS) research – critical systemic thinking (CST). Drawing upon previous work, the authors highlight the principal features of CST within the tradition of critical research and attempt to relate it to trends in the Italian school of IS research in recent years, as exemplified by the work of Claudio Ciborra but also evident in work by, e.g. Resca, Jacucci and D'Atri.

This is a conceptual paper which explores CST, characterised by a focus on individual uniqueness, and socially‐constructed, individual worldviews as generators of human knowing.

The paper draws on work by Heinz Klein in which he elaborated three constitutive stages in critical research: interpretive, genealogical and constructive. The authors introduce a fourth, reflective stage and discuss five categories of critical research, reflecting different perspectives on emancipation, culminating in emergent expressionism, associated with Ciborra and the Italian school more generally.

This paper discusses approaches to CST and how they might have practical implications in IS development. The distinction between approaches founded in logical empiricism and those founded in hermeneutic dialectics are considered and the development of critical and systems strands are discussed.

The paper addresses CST as an approach to development of information systems. Such approaches enable users to explore their individually unique understandings and create a constructive dialogue with one another, which emancipates and empowers users to own and control their own development processes and hence build more productive and usable systems.

A focus on research which is oriented towards emancipation in the tradition of critical social theory.

The paper draws on extensive theoretical research carried out by the authors over a period of more than ten years in CST and synthesises the practical implications.

While the literature on software process improvement (SPI) offers a number of studies of small software firms, little is known about how such initiatives evolve over time. On this backdrop, this paper aims to investigate how adoption of SPI technology was shaped over a ten year period (1996‐2005) in a small Danish software firm.

The investigation is based on a longitudinal, interpretative case study of improvement efforts over a ten‐year period. To help structure the investigation, we focus on encounters that impacted engineering, management, and improvement practices within the firm. The study contributes to the SPI‐literature and the literature on organizational adoption of technology.

The paper finds the improvement effort fluctuating and shaped between management's attempt to control SPI technology adoption and events that caused the process to drift in unpredictable directions.

The experiences suggest that managers of small software firms remain flexible and constantly negotiate technology adoption practices between control and drift, creating momentum and direction according to firm goals through attempts to control, while at the same time exploring backtalk, options, and innovations from drifting forces inside and outside the firm.

Based on the research, the paper recommends substituting the “from control to drift” perspective on organizational adoption of complex technologies like SPI with a “negotiating control and drift” perspective.

This chapter advances an articulation of the contemporary knowledge worker as an infrastructural bricoleur. The practical and pragmatic intelligence of the contemporary knowledge worker, particularly those involved in project-based work, reflects an ability to build adaptable practices and routines, and to develop a set of working arrangements that is creative and event-laden. Like Ciborra’s octopi, workers augment infrastructures by drawing on certain forms of oblique, twisted, flexible, circular, polymorphic and ambiguous thinking until an accommodation can be found. These workers understand the non-linearity of work and working, and are artful in their pursuits around, through and beyond infrastructural givens. Modern knowledge work, then, when looked at through the lens of infrastructure and bricolage, is less a story of failure to understand, a limitation in training or the shortcomings of a system, but instead is more a mirror of the contemporary realities of today’s knowledge work drift as reflected in individuals’ sociotechnical practices.

A report of a market survey carried out in Europe to identify the role of technological, economic and social factors in fostering or impeding the diffusion of industrial robots, both today and in the future.

The traditional role of computer‐based information systems is to provide support for individual decision making. According to this model, information is to be seen as a valuable resource for the decision maker faced with a complex task. Such a view of information systems in organizations does however fail to include such phenomena as the daily use of information for misrepresen‐tation purposes. The conventional systems analysis methods, whether they are data‐ or decision‐oriented, do not help in understanding the nature of organizations and their ways of processing information. This paper proposes what appears to be a more realistic approach to the analysis and design of information systems. Organizations are seen as networks of contracts which govern exchange transactions between members having only partially overlapping goals. Conflict of interests is explicitly admitted to be a factor affecting information and exchange costs. Information technology is seen as a means to streamline exchange transactions, thus enabling economic organizations to operate more efficiently. Examples are given of MIS, data base and office automation systems, where both the organization and its information system were jointly designed. These examples illustrate the power of the approach, which is based on recent research in the new institutional economics.

The design of effective systems for cooperative work must be based on a thorough understanding of the forces that shape cooperation and influence the productivity of the work group. We argue that cooperative work is not a straightforward social process whose stability can be taken for granted. On the contrary, each case of work group formation and process is uniquely influenced by its contextual forces. The appropriate type of information technology for the work group, and the impact of the technology on work group performance, are also determined in part by that context.

The recent managerial literature on the development of corporate infrastructures to deliver sophisticated and flexible IT capabilities is based on a set of assumptions concerning the role of management in strategy formulation, planning and control; the role of IT as a tool; the linkages between infrastructure and business processes; the implementation process. This paper deconstructs such assumptions by gradually enriching the conventional management agenda with new priorities stemming from other styles of taking care of infrastructures. The original, straightforward management agenda appears to be lacking: its foundations are irremediably shaken. The paper finally evokes a philosophy‐based agenda, the only one valuable in the uncharted territory where the usual foundations do not deliver any longer. Such an agenda speaks a language of weak agency: releasement; dwelling with mystery; capacity to drop the tools; valuing marginal practices. Will the last agenda play a key role in coping with the information infrastructures of the next millennium?

The paper aims to show, through the case of Jordan, how e‐government is difficult to implement, given the characteristics of the local administration, the socio‐economic context and the dynamics of the technological infrastructure. It also aims to ascertain more generally whether the marketisation of the state, embedded in e‐government, makes sense as the paramount approach to improve democracy and foster development.

Describes how the Kingdom of Jordan, as a case study of an innovative and extensive application of e‐government ideas and models, provides a paradigmatic example of how ICTs are being introduced in economically less developed countries and identifies the risks of failure in implementation. Based on the empirical evidence provided by the case, examines the more general implications of e‐government and new public management in the transformation of the relationship between the state and citizen.

The transformation of citizens into customers is problematic, and the correlation between good governance and minimal state with development can hardly be demonstrated historically.

The paper puts forward a new interpretation centred on the newly established link between aid and security. In this light, e‐government appears to be one of the new tools for the rich metropolitan states to govern “at a distance” (through sophisticated methodologies and technologies) the potentially dangerous, weak, borderland states.

The aim of this paper is to argue that the need for strategy is overstated and that organizations should celebrate short‐term thinking.

The paper presents a case study of a medium‐sized software company in Canada, followed by an analysis in terms of the history of strategy and Ciborra's work on organizational change.

The study finds that strategy and structure are taken‐for‐granted assumptions that are not always appropriate. While strategy is important for contemporary business, it has overstepped its relevance and has been become the dominant organizing myth of modern management. Such a myth has become an obsession that quite often constrains the variety of organizational responses. The notion of strategy has become an “iron cage” which constrains manoeuvrability.

Short‐term thinking has tremendous benefits and should be embraced.

The paper provides a useful insight into the benefits of short‐term thinking.