The management of information infrastructure:
new views and possibilities
Version 980704
(Printout 8/7/12)
by Kristo Ivanov
Ume University,
Department of Informatics, S-901 87 UME (Sweden).
Phone +46 90
7866030, Fax +46 90 7866550, E-mail: kivanov@informatik.umu.se
It has been remarked when dealing with management of so called information infrastructure that infrastructure is particularly resistant to the most frequent managerial interventions. What is also at stake in this kind of issue is also the question of what is to be intended by terms such as infrastructure and management. I will review a recent overview of this area (Ciborra, & Hanseth, 1998) in order to highlight the type of knowledge that tends to be ignored and that would be helpful for research aimed at improving the present situation. In what follows I will use the same headings proposed by the mentioned overview. I will conclude with some thoughts concerning the most fruitful direction for further research on the management of infrastructures.
The management agenda refers to the approaches advanced under such labels as strategy and organization: aligning business strategy with technical systems' architecture, stardardization of data and equipment including protocols and gateways, flexibility that provides opportunities for new applications and new businesses, security, etc.
What seems to be central to this approach, sinthesizing most of the used keywords, is the concept of strategy. In fact, it includes the question of flexibility in such a way that, for example, it becomes unnecessary to envisage the need of balancing so called alignment (of business strategy with IT-architecture) versus flexibility (enabling the firm to seize a wide range of future unplanned business redesign options). The idea of balancing the two arises in fact from the assumptions that the concept of strategy can by definition only refer to the isolated spheres of a taken for granted "technology", versus "the rest".
My first contention will be that this assumption needs to be analyzed and questioned. This would be done by delving into the concept of strategy, and relating it to the concept of technology
Strategy will be understood as a primary concern with external, rather than internal, problems of the firm and specifically with selections of "product-mix" which the "firm" will "produce" and the "markets" to which it will "sell". The strategic problem is thus the problem of deciding what business the firm is in and what kind of businesses it will seek to enter (Ansoff, 1968). The term strategic is then taken to mean "pertaining to the relation between the firm and its environment" in a sense which is close to the dialectical social systems theory on which great part of our research philosophy is based. In technical terms, used by mathematical decision theorists, specification of strategy is forced under conditions of partial ignorance, when alternatives cannot be arranged and examined in advance, whereas under conditions of risk (alternatives are known and so are their probabilities) or uncertainty (alternatives are all known but not their probabilities), the consequences of different alternatives can be analysed in advance and decisions made contingent on their occurence. In terms of systems theory, the distinctions are not sharp and strategy amounts to the identification of assumptions behind decisions as a means for design of appropriate action. The question is whether there is a consistent understanding of how strategy should be designed. My attitude in this paper will be to follow some ideas in the literature on strategy in order to generate ideas which will linked to the management of infrastructure, and will be eventually referred back to social systems theory.
Strategy is here considered as a primary determinant of the content and form of the business activities. (Anonym, 1993a), however, points out that there seems to be no agreement on the most basic question of what is a corporate strategy. There is a trend away from formal planning at big firms which has been gathering pace for the past 35 years. In a vast outpouring of writing on the subject during this period, management theorists have come up with so many alternative views of what a corporate strategy should contain that they have undermined the entire concept. "A growing number businessmen now question whether thinking consciously about an overall strategy is of any benefit at all to big firms." Talk about diversification, conglomerates, statistics, targets, forecasts of economies and specific markets culminated in "competitive strategy", finding niches which could be defended by competitors, either becoming a low-cost producer, diferentiating the products in a way which would allow to command a higher profit margin, or erecting barriers to the entry of new rivals. The criticism is that the advices, consisting of checklists, provide little prescritive guide to what the firms should actually do, or avoid doing.
The most influential strain of theorising about strategy in the 1980's has stressed expanding a firm's skills - rapid product development, high-quality manufacturing, technological innovation and service - and then finding markets or networking into a "virtual firm" or into a "Japanology, Inc" or "Holding hands" in all sorts of alliances like joint ventures, licensing deals, research consortia, supply agreements, etc. (Anonym, 1993a; Anonym, 1993b, on the global firm p. 65; Emmott, 1993, survey on multinationals pp. 18ff), in which to exploit those skills.
The overall conclusion seems to be that "How a company views strategy depends largely on its circumstances. Small firms determined to challenge behemoths may find it helpful to call their aspirations a 'strategy''. Big firms defending a dominant market position may find Mr. Porter's industry analysis illuminating. All firms should try to exploit and hone their skills. But there is no single way to approach the future. The next time your boss proudly boasts that he is off to a strategic-planning meeting, give him your condolences."
The concept of strategy, if taken seriously, is indeed exceedingly complex (Ackoff, 1990, Ansoff, 1968 #1722). Ansoff (p. 94) points out that a firm needs a well-defined scope and growth direction, that objectives alone do not meet this need, and that additional decision rules are required if the firm is to have orderly and profitable growth. Such decision rules and guidelines have been broadly defined as strategy or, sometimes as the concept of the firm's business. This amounts roughly to the acknowledged need of completing objectives with a definition of the system to which these needs refer, as well as to the need of differentiating between goals, objectives, and ideals (Churchman, 1979). It leads further to the acknowledgement of the need to grasp not only ideals, objectives or goals but also environmental variables and resources, as well as the need to design an organizational structure for the business in terms of subsystems, etc.
Nevertheless following Ansoff's search for core characteristics of the present business may have a heuristic value in giving a continuity in terms of management, technical, production,and marketing skills. This "common thread" of continuity is a relationship between present and future market products which would enable outsiders (but not competitors!) to perceive where the firm is heading, and the inside management to give it guidance. In trying to determine how strong the common thread must be it is useful to review how firms identify the nature of their business. This is done in terms of their product line, technology, and markets. Markets are in turn defined in terms of mission (product need) and customer or actual buyer of the product, and economic unit like and individual, a family or a business firm which possesses both the need and the money with which to satisfy it. The usefulness of this distinction lies in the fact that sometimes the customer is erroneously identified as the common thread of a firm's business. The one same customer may, however, have needs which represent different product technology, distribution channels, and customer motivations. In selecting a useful range of missions of a particular customer a firm needs to find a common thread either in product characteristics, technology, or similarity of needs. The traditional identification of a firm with a particular industry (in our case, "university"?) has become too narrow.. The need is for a concept of business of common thread which will give both a specific guidance and will provide room for growth or development.
Thus, the first attempt to grasp a common thread is by means of goals and objectives as in terms of "growth" or "broad base". A more positive specification of the common thread is arrived through the use of the product-market scope. This is done in terms of particular industries and sub-industries which allow the use of available statistics and economic forecasts, and also contain product markets and technologies with similar characteristics. Another useful specification of common thread is through the means of the growth vector which indicates the direction in which the firm is moving with respect to its current product-market posture: market penetration, market development, product development, and diversification. A third way to see a common thread is to isolate characteristics of unique opportunities within the field defined by the product-market scope and the growth vector. This is the competitive advantage. It seeks to identifiy particular properties of individual product-markets which will give the firm a strong competitive position.
The triplet of specifications - the product-market scope, the growth vector, and the competitive advantage - describes the firm's product-market path in the external environment. A fourth alternative for describing the common thread is synergy, or a measure of the firm's ability to make good on a new product-market entry on the basis of its strenghts and weaknesses.
By applying concepts from the conomics of industrial structure to problems of strategy, Michael Porter (1980) has identified five basic stakeholder forces that affect the competitive position of a firm (where stakeholders are parties who are affected by the organizations's activities or with whom the organization engages in conducting its business): Customer power, Supplier power, Substitution - the possibility that other firms will provide products or services that can be substituted for yours, New entrants - the attractiveness of your industry to others and the magnitude of the barriers that preclude them from entering, Rivalry - the intensity of intraindustry competition.
Richard Mason (1984) points out how the competitive strategy has been used as a primary determinant of information systems. It is obviously exciting to imagine how IS itself, the supposed core of our skill, could be used in order to enhance competitive strategy.
In following Mason's suggestions some relevant tasks would be related to the three main roles of leader, maestro, and super-tech with the following division of responsibilities:
LEADER: Strategic vision, Incubate R&D projects, Recruit and groom maestros (see below), Court & manage manufacturers (beyond off-the shelf technology), Adapt organization to utilize its potential implications for personnel change agents, Create and maintain IT-strategy, Integrate it into the normal, day-to-day operating and managing of the business
MAESTRO: IT entrepreneur, Tough minded bottom line focused manager, Leader and mentor of competent tecnologists, Organizational change agent, Organizer of business-focused IT strategic planning process
SUPER-TECHS: R&D - Emerging technologies, Project management, Customer service, Operations: hardware, software and procedures
And, in general. for each key role:
1. Think of what we should be doing and do not do
2. Think of what we should not do but are doing.
My point in what may appear as a digression above is to point out by comparison at the fact that most discussion of management of IT-infrastructure today keep their argumentation at a very aggregate level without making it clear what they mean by technology and strategy or, for that matter, flexibility. One consequence is that they may talk, for instance, about "analysis of the firm's strategic context so as to elicit the key business drivers", or generally about "role, responsibilities, incentives, skills, and organizational structures" mixing far reaching vague, undefined terms in an analytical potpourri that does not even match the analytical sophistication of older and by now almost classic literature on strategy mentioned above. Another overall consequence is that they can even construct puzzling dichotomies between strategy, implicitly understood as business strategy, and flexibility, implicitly understood as relating to a vague technology, without realizing that the concept of strategy itself, as opposed for instance to tactics or operational activities, incorporates the idea of flexibility and that it this is what gives it its legitimacy and meaning. The work by Mason, as pointed out above, disregarding its possible limitations or flaws, has the merit of reminding us of the fact that IT-strategy should by definition include and integrate both business strategy and IT-flexibility, whatever it means, and that this will probably require the design and introduction of new terms or, rather, concepts. It also indicates a direction of research that could be further pursued.
A similar issue may be raised about the management of infrastructure in what concerns its relation with the issue of implementation. Wise suggestions or quasi-philosophical or moralistic imperatives are sometimes advanced regarding, for instance, that "managers must be ready to learn and adapt", and that "there are barriers that due to political, cultural or economic factors impede the smooth implementation of any strategic plan concerning infrastructure" (as if there were to be two different strategies for infrastructure and business). There is, in other words, a sort of naive reawakening to the issue of implementation, or to the transition from a vision, whatever that means in today's "Newspeak", in contrast to good old goals-objectives-ideals, and reality. The lack of political sophistication, if not the navet, consists of not recognizing and benefitting from the extensive research and debate on implemention before the advent of IT and its discourses on infrastructure (Churchman, & Schainblatt, 1965; Duncan, 1974). To the extent that IT indeed requires special regard for the nature of technology it can be said that that discussions of such a nature seem to be lacking with a few if not only exceptions (Ciborra, et al., 1998). Our conclusion? Back to basics! Or, at least, back to homework on history and to thinking, why not in Heidegger's sense "What calls for thinking?" (Heidegger, 1954/1971).
The economic approach to the management of infrastructure, assuming that such managerial framing of the question is possible and justified, refers to issues of standards, economics of standards, pricing, and, in particular, princing of public goods.
Despite of the approach being claimed to be economic, there is scanty reference to economic theory or to definitions of, for instance, standards.
To start with standards, it must make a difference what is meant by such a word if we are going to be able to discuss its economic and political realities. If one, for instance, defines standard as consisting of "a set of operations which in principle till resolve any disagreements arising in the community", as Churchmans does (1971, p. 188), then it will not come as a surprise the need to discover that "there are barriers that due to political, cultural or economics factors impede the smooth implementation of any strategic plan concerning infrastructure". The whole point in designing a standard at all is exactly that, to design agreement, and the main problem is, namely, to take into account disagreement. That is the main reason, indeed, for Churchman to conceptualize the design of inquiring systems (and not of information systems) in terms of archetypal typologies such as what he calls Leibnizian, Lockean, Kantian, Hegelian, and Singerian inquiring systems. The reason why the practice and the research on infrastructures is stuck today, and claims are laid that platitudes are the result of research on the matter, may be that our conceptions of standards is "Lockean" that is more of less uncounsciously framed in terms of consensus that does not allow for systematic elaboration of conflicts, such as in the "Hegelian" or "Singerian" perspectives. Therefore one can suddenly find it worthy to consider the tactic of "counter-action" (in order to prevent the "policy window" from slamming shut before the policy makers are better able to perceive the shape of their relevant future options), without being aware that "counter-action" is a basic ingredient in "Hegelian inquiring systems" not to mention the Marxistic twist represented by political participation in systems design.
In the same vein, in discussing matters of infrastructure, there is usually a lot of talk about resources, for instance in the would-be discovery that management has "to live with a resource that it can govern only in part", or a lot of talk about environment without neither resources nor environment being defined. If they were, then everybody would probably realize that many supposed insights are tautologies, in the sense that the whole point in differentiating between resources and environment is to foster analysis and investigation of the controllability difference aspects of the management situation (Churchman, 1971, chap. 3). Resources will be, then, what can be controlled, and environment what cannot be controlled (by a particular manager or power constellation) in view of the goals, objectives, or vision-ideals (of clients or stakeholders). Again, to claim then than resources can be governed only in part, or that infrastructure cannot be changed instantly, will clearly amount to tautoloties and muddled thinking that shrinks from the painful task of thinking on power, interests, and analytical relationships.
Let us now pass on to the issue of pricing as it is related to the above mentioned concept of environment. If infrastructure and its definitional stability or lack of flexibility are related to, if now equated, with environment or, for that matter, context, then it will become clear the whole issue tends to collapse into the classical and age-honoured question of fixed costs in economic theory. The disagreeable discovery would then be made of the facts that the problem of infrastructure is indeed the problem of investment and return on investment in an economic and political context. The superficiality of much talk about standards and infrastructure would then become patent, especially if it is compared with sound common sense reviews by journalists who seem to be more sophisticated than many researchers. One beautiful example if an analysis of the economics of the Internet (Anonym, 1996) that indeed exceeds the sophistication of most researchers who today uncritically refer to and exploit that infrastructure for supposedly democratic or profitable purposes without ever reflecting about who is paying for it, and why.
Some of the social studies of technology have their starting point in the insight that infrastructures can be seen as socio-technical networks defy old approaches which assume that their future can be consciously designed. This is so because the infrastructural base seems to act as an independent "actor" in that it influences the outcomes in ways that are not predictable. The way to deal with infrastructures is, then, not the conscious managerial style but rather by a new governing, rather than managerial "style" of adaptive response to different environments. This unique style would be determined not only by technology but also by "culture, bodies of regulation, habits and mindsets", hopefully complements by rules that would discern an "aesthetics" of infrastructures.
Never mind how to determine how such vagues dimensions should determine the style of adaptive response when all the involved terms float in a vague ocean of ambiguities. It is obviously true that the shape and consequences of infrastructures escape conscious design in the sense that the predictions and outcomes never fully match the "actuality", whatever it may be in a non-positivisti and non-empirical perspective. The question is, rather, what is to be gained in noting, for instance, that infrastructures are not just made of networks, data flows, and work procedures, but are also embodyments of "emerging modes of work organization", of new cognitive imageries and institutional arrangements" as it has been stated in a critical review of research on infrastructure.
The crux of the matter, as I see it, is that the discrepancy between design and outcome or implementation has always been there also for "conscious designers" whatever that exactly means. The discrepancy has been analytically accounted for, in both good old operation research and in a more sophisticated way in modern dialectical social systems theory, by either the "environment" in a Lockean consensual systems setting, by differences in representations in a Kantian setting, by the clash of worldviews in a Hegelian setting, or, if you will, by the clash between social classes in a Marxist setting. To talk about culture, bodies of regulation (where law is seen in the Marxist view as a superstructure of the dominant social order), style of adaptation (where style of thinking would have to take into account, for instance, the whole apparatus of Jungian analytical psychology and its "types"), habits (whose conceptions would barely match the level of sophistication of the seminal work by Maine de Biran and Felix Ravaisson) (Maine de Biran, 1987; Ravaisson, 1838/1997).
One thing that is particularly disturbing in the criticism of conscious design is, however, the (teleological!) attribution of agency to infrastructure and its technical components. It such a conception is not an outright embodyment of the Marxist idea of "dead labour" or to what, in other contexts, has been referred to as the "naturalistic fallacy", then the only way I know of to justify it is to interprete the attempt in terms of "teleological objects" or, equivalently "teleological systems". That means that ordinary physical objects in conjunction with humans can be conceived as a teleological entity with properties that transcend the properties of their components and, in this sense, are "emergent" (Churchman, 1971, chap. 3). This is a far cry, however, from attributing to "the world" or its objects a sort of immanent teleology of its own in the spirit of a watered-down Chinese Taoism or its ideological postmodern counterpart in the West that is based on a aestheticist misreading or misuse of Immanuel Kant's Third Critique, of Judgement, and its teleology (Ivanov, & Ciborra, 1998). (Cf. the reference sometimes to "an aesthetics of infrastructures".)
For the rest, the discussion about infrastructure would probably benefit from knowledge on the advanced economic analysis that derived from the post-war efforts in applying a blend of micro-economics and macro-economics, or business administration and political economics, to so called cost-benefit analysis of public works (McKean, 1958).
It is not to be denied that Martin Heidegger's work on technology has been one of the most remarkable attempts to probe into the essence of technology and, as such, has captured the attention of those who study its uses and misuses.
In the spirit of this work it has been remarked (Ciborra, et al., 1998) that it may be fruitful to conceive of infrastructure in general och IT-infrastructure in particular as what Heidegger calls "Gestell". This is the gathering of multiple actions of ordering (placing, arranging, regulating) and their enchainement, in order to store and accumulate resources, and to make them available on demand, turning them into a Be-stand or a standing reserve (of resources). Energy and (we assume from Heidegger's own examples involving, for instance, newspapers) also information that is supposed to be concealed in nature is unlocked, transformed, distributed, and switched, revealing assumed truths that are indeed "dangerous" because their interpretation is subject to error. The danger itself, however, is mysteriously considered by Heidegger as also being an opportunity to offset the Gestell-tendency to dehumanize man.
I must confess that Heidegger's approach to the essence of technology really tells me something important, but I am not sure what. To begin with the end, the ambiguous importance of danger make sense to me if it is interpreted in the sense of a quotation from the pragmatist Clarence Lewis that I myself used once without recording the title of the source (Ivanov, 1976): "Knowledge has two opposites: ignorance and error". In contrast to positivism, the enlightened approach to science does not consider error as a nuisance to the assumed accuracy of direct observation, but, rather, incorporates error into the theory, and turns error into a heuristic learning device through the attempts of explaining its nature and magnitude. Whatever other interpretation is to be given to the allusion of the positive value of danger, it must be confessed that it has to rely on an extremely obscure of Heidegger's text, "The question concerning technology" (Heidegger, 1978).
It is also clear that both databases and the internet give us a clear impression that everything is being accumulated and put at the tip of our fingerprints. Even people themselves, including ourselves, are supposed in some way to stand "near" (and yet, as Heidegger points out, far) in the sense that they stand as a reserve on demand, our demand for, say, contact, at the touch of our finger that presses the keyboard of a computer in order to send an electronic mail.
These insights, however, are not so new or revolutionary as they may seem since they are also inherent to the understanding of knowledge as power, and also, in my view, of the perverted view of the ethical "good" as being what it good or appropriate (efficient) in making us achieve what we happen to desire.(Ivanov, 1991, section on "Pragmatism and religion", p. 43, drawing upon F.C.S. Schiller's contribution on "pragmatism" in the 1911 year's edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica; Ivanov, 1993, note 20 on p. 14, and note 25 on p.18). It is also within the tradition of certain late branches of pragmatism that we can raise the insight of why one can get the impression that Gestell as a reunion of ordering processes, or even literally as "a frame that sets up" overcomes in felicitous way the dichotomy between the "structural" (understood as static) aspects of infrastructure, and their dynamics. The reason is to be found in its recalling of the relation between morphological (structural), functional, and teleological classes for the "anatomy of goal seeking" (Churchman, 1971, pp. 43-47). In a really felicitous way the schema of structural (static), functional (dynamic), and teleological (human ethical) classes gives a sort of synthetic view of our description of nature with an architecture that follows the spirit of "aesthetic teleology" in the earlier mentioned Kantian Thirs Critique, of judgement (Kant, 1790/1987). While this architecture can be applied to the analysis of concrete infrastructural problems (Sachs, & Broholm, 1989), it can also be shown that it is related to the most qualified empirical and theoretical problems in the development of life sciences and their integration of physics with biology and a philosophy of "organization" (Asma, 1996).
Furthermore, in other modern comprenhensive works on the nature of technology (Mitcham, & Grote, 1984) it is made clear by various contributors in some main essays that the "The central question, even in the philosophy of technology, is ultimately theological in character" (ibid., page v). The central question that is ultimately theological is exactly the kind of issue that Heidegger translates into his arcane language of Ge-stell, concealing the scandalous fact that man is victimized by his drive to power at the expense of love or, in Christian terms, charity, while striving for usurpating God's place in the Western theological order. Disregarding the trouble that Heidegger himself seems to have in the relation between his work and his philosophy, theology, and ethics. "The cure for the dangers of technology cannot come from technology itself...We need more clarity about goals, but these are not fixed by technology [its "dangers"]. At this point, however, we might blame Heidegger himself for never having developed an ethical side to his philosophy. Indeed, it could be complained with some justice that from his early thinking onward, he consistently avoided ethical questions" (Macquarrie, 1994, p. 70, my italics and my brackets). Indeed, it can be remarked that Heidegger himself does not take stance towards technology which, in a way, is "neutral", while, in other contexts, Heidegger makes it clear that it is not to be considered neutral as in the sense of being only a means. Nevertheless, these kinds of ambiguities are probably one symptom of the overall ethical ambiguities of the author, as pointed out by some of his most authoritative commentators (ibid.).
Now we come to what I think can be the reason for the attractivity of Heidegger in the our context. For the secular, profane man in the present society Heidegger seems to offer a taste of transcendence and mysticism, an acknowledgement of metaphysics, and an intuition of man's relationship to God in the name of "Being". It seems that Heidegger better than anybody else has been able to translate Christian theology in the arcane language of pre-socratic philosophy to the point that it is not even philosophy anymore, as understood in the Western subscription to Platonic and Aristotelian philsophy. In other words, Heidegger may have tried to appropriate his translated heritage of the Christian adaptation of Greek philosophy by directing himself backwards towards pre-socratics like Heraclitus and Parmenides (and Sophocles). This rejection of Christianity may also appear from Heidegger's interest in Nietzsche and his "turning upside-down" of Platonism as in the essay on "Beyond metaphysics", and in "Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?" (Heidegger, 1954/1985, pp. 45-82). This would also consistent with the postmodern "return of the body" in "virtual reality" where, as Heidegger writes "the sensible becomes the true world, and the suprasensible the non-true world" or, in our terms, at least ambiguous distinction between the two (ibid. p. 51). This may be equivalent to the statement that "The essence of technology, the Gestell carries its own simulation" At the same time it is a merit, if yet dubious, that Heidegger vehemently and ambiguously confronts what seems to me to be his description of what the ateleological postmoderns today might call bricolage: "An inconditional search, which flexibly studies the means, the reasons, the obstacles; implies the calculative thought which changes the goals, and committs itself provisionally again and again, the mistification, the cunning play of skills, the inquisitive spirit...the lack of goals...the pure will which is its own content as it is form" (ibid., p. 58, my re-translation).
For all his play with important ambiguities Heidegger is exceedingly obscure in where he wants to go, or wants his readers to go in their inquiry with the exxception that they must learn "what it does mean to think") co-translated to the Italian by the leading Italian postmodern philosopher Gianni Vattimo (Heidegger, 1954/1971). The main thing that is clear to me is, in summary, that Heidegger must be very attractive for the many who, because of some reason, cannot, do not dare or do not want to take the step over (or back) to Christianity today, and look for good intellectual reasons for that (Bartley III, 1984). And, as in the case of flirtation with Chinese Taoism, the supreme appeal must come from the apparent absence of any particular request for commitment on the part of the reader "believer" (Ivanov, 1997). This is a far cry from the likewise ambiguously permissive attitude of Heidegger to ethics and to the "neutrality" of technology which gives the impression that one can have the cake and eat it too in what concerns its adoption and exploitation, to the point that danger (as the famous Chinese "crisis") implies (positive) opportunity. This is also a far cry away from the comparatively heavy anxiety that at first sight is raised by the expectations of the Judaeo-Christian God concerning personal conduct and such, including the painful commitment of trust which not by chance is experiencing a renaissance in economic research today (Huemer, 1998).
I conclude agreeing that the challenge of management of IT-infrastructure today puts in evidence our powerlessness in our unbridled quest for power through and over technology. In this respect Heidegger's conception of the essence of technology casts some light for our intuitions as they can be expressed in his arcane ambiguous language. This ambiguity opens, however, the way for a flight from a Christian conception of technology and what the real power issue is about (Mitcham, et al., 1984), in the direction of irresponsible postmodern playfulness and flirtation with diluted versions of Chinese worldviews. As for continued research on this question I am convinced that we should stick to our Western and Christian tradition that we presumably have better chances to understand. If we should put an effort in this that is comparable in the size of the effort in understanding pre-Socratics or Chinese world views we would have a better chance to understand were we and our infrastructures are going, and raise the forces necessary to do something about it.
Ackoff, R. L. (1990). Strategy. Systems Practice, 3(6), 521-524.
Anonym. (1993a). Eenie, meenie, minie, mo... : Top managers of big firms devote the bulk of their efforts to formulating strategy, though there is remarkably little agreement about what it is. The Economist, (March 20th), 80, see also 81, 96.
Anonym. (1993b). The global firm: R.I.P. The Economist, February 6th(65),
Anonym. (1996). The economics of the Internet. The Economist, (October 19th), 21-24. (Cf. same issue "Why the net should grow up", p. 15; Letters on "Cybernomics" in November 16th, pp. 6-8; "Electronic conflicts of interest" in January 18th 1997.)
Ansoff, H. I. (1968). Corporate strategy: An analytic approach to business policy for growth and expansion . Harmondsworth: Penguin Books: (1st ed. MacGraw-Hill, 1965. Page refs. to 1968 ed.)
Asma, S. T. (1996). Following form and function: A philosophical archaelogy of life science . Evanston, Ill.
Bartley III, W. W. (1984). The retreat to commitment . La Salle & London: Open Court Publishing.
Churchman, C. W. (1971). The design of inquiring systems: Basic principles of systems and organization . New York: Basic Books. Out of print.
Churchman, C. W. (1979). The systems approach and its enemies . New York: Basic Books.
Churchman, C. W., & Schainblatt, A. H. (1965). The researcher and the manager: a dialectics of implementation. Management Science, 11(4, Feb.), (Cf. also the subsequent debate in the same journal.)
Ciborra, C. U., & Hanseth, O. (1998). From tool to Gestell: Agendas for managing the information infrastructure. Draft, ,
Duncan, W. J. (1974). The researcher and the manager: A comparative view of the need for mutual understanding. Management Science, 20(8), 1157-1163.
Emmott, B. (1993). Multinationals – Survey. The Economist, 326(7804, March 27th), Survey after p. 68: 1-26.
Heidegger, M. (1954/1971). Wass heisst Denken? . Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. (Page refs. to the Italian translation by U. Ugazio and G. Vattimo Che cosa significa pensare? Milano: SugarCo, 1988. Cf. also M. Heidegger Saggi e discorsi, Milano: Mursia, 1985, pp. 85-95. English trans. of a fragment in Heidegger, M., Basic writings . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978, pp. 341-367. Orig. Vortrge und Aufstze. Verlag Gnther Neske Pfullingen, 1954.)
Heidegger, M. (1954/1985). Vortrge und Aufstze . Verlag Gnther Neske Pfullingen. (Page refs. to the Italian translation, Saggi e discorsi. Milano: Mursia, 1985.)
Heidegger, M. (1978). Basic writings . London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. (Ed. and introd. by David Farrell Krell.)
Huemer, L. (1998). Trust in business relations: Economic logic or social interaction? . Ume: Bora. (Doctoral diss., Ume university, Dept. of Business Administration. ISSN 91-89140-02-8.)
Ivanov, K. (1976). Frn statistisk kontroll till kontroll ver statistiken: Systemisk redovisning av fel i underskningar inklusive avvgningar mellan kvalitet och medborgerlig integritet (Research report No.1976:9, ISSN 0347-2108). University of Stockholm, Dept of Statistics.
Ivanov, K. (1991). Computer-supported human science or humanistic computing science? Steps toward the evaluation of a humanistic computing science (UMADP-WPIPCS-41.91:3). Ume University, Inst. of Information Processing. Rev. ed. of paper presented at the Tenth International Human Science Research Association Conference, August 18-22, 1991, Gothenburg. (See esp. chap. on Cooperative work: Examples of problems, pp. 55-76.)
Ivanov, K. (1993). Belief and reason, power and heroism in the task of the systems designer: Commented selections on presuppositions of participatory cooperative argumentative design and change (UMADP-WPIPCS-47.93.2, ISSN 0282-0587). Ume University, Inst. of Information Processing. (2nd rev. ed.)
Ivanov, K. (1997). Strategies and design for information technology: Eastern or neo-romantic wholes, and the return to Western systems . Ume: Ume University, Dept. of Informatics.
Ivanov, K., & Ciborra, C. U. (1998). East
and West of IS. In W. R. J. Baets (Ed.), Proc. of the Sixth European
Conference on Information Systems ECIS'98, University of Aix-Marseille III,
Aix-en-Provence, June 4-6, 1998. Vol. IV (pp. 1740-1748). Granada & Aix-en-Provence:
Euro-Arab Management School & Institut d'Administration des Enterprises
IAE. (ISBN for complete proceedings: 84-923833-0-5)
Kant, I. (1790/1987). Critique of judgement . Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett. (Trans. with an introduction by Werner S. Pluhar. Foreword by Mary J. Gregor.)
Macquarrie, J. (1994). Heidegger and Christianity: The Hensley Henson Lectures 1993-94 . London: SCM Press.
Maine de Biran. (1987). Oeuvres. Tome II: Influence de l'habitude sur la facult de penser . Paris: Vrin. (English trans. The influence of habit on the faculty of thinking, 1929. New ed. by Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, USA, 1970.)
Mason, R. O. (1984). Information systems technology and corporate strategy: Current research issues, and discussion. In F. W. McFarlan (Ed.), The information systems research challenge (pp. 279-308). Boston: Harvard Business School Press.
McKean, R. N. (1958). Efficiency in government through systems analysis . New York: Wiley. (Swedish trans. by H.Johansson & L.Sundin, Ngra av lnsamhetsanalysens grundbegrepp. New York: Academic Press, 1969.)
Mitcham, C., & Grote, J. (Ed.) (1984). Theology and technology: Essays in Christian analysis and exegesis. Lanham: University Press of America. (Esp. pp. 3-42, 53-119, 193-225. Bibliography of 478 entries.)
Porter, M. E. (1980). Competitive strategy: Techniques for analyzing industries and competition . New York: Free Press.
Ravaisson, F. (1838/1997). De l'habitude . Paris: Payot & Rivages.
Sachs, W., & Broholm, P. (1989). Hypertrophy in the micro-computer revolution. In C. W. Churchman (Ed.), The well-being of organizations (pp. 171-177). Salinas, Calif.: Intersystems.