Content area
Full Text
Introduction
In his work, Claudio Ciborra (1998b, 1999a, 1999b, 2000, 2001, 2004) does not simply offer us a new set of normative models, guidelines or suggestions of how to develop and use information technology. He is not even suggesting that we 'go out there' and study in more detail the seemingly endless 'failure' of IT (Sauer, 1993). Rather, he is proposing that we rethink our very way of approaching the phenomenon of IT - to take more careful note of our assumed or explicitly chosen ontology. In his view our starting point was wrong from the start. In building and using tools we tend to think of these as 'objective' material things (separate from us) that we can simply use (or not) to do whatever we want to do. This view is rooted in our everyday intuitions in which the subject/object dualism is taken for granted, that is, in a form of naive realism (or the 'natural attitude' in Husserl's terminology). This relationship between us and our tools is often expressed as a means/ends relationship where technology is designed as a means (or tool) to achieve a particular end (defined by the designers and users). According to this view, we need to understand and manage the 'impact' that IT has on organisations, or social practices more generally, as it is taken up and used in everyday situations. To do this, it is proposed that we study many different examples and then inductively build general models that are supposed to 'tell us' how to best manage IT. However, when we go into organisations these 'idealised' abstractions never seem to fit the messy specificity of everyday life (Ciborra, 1998b) - every example seems to be an exception to the model that is supposed to describe it. The route out of this is not more models, or more detailed descriptions, but rather a radically different approach, from the start. Ciborra proposes an entirely different ontology to the realist 'tool' paradigm or even the constructivist paradigm.
He suggests that we ground ourselves in phenomenology - mostly the work of Husserl and Heidegger - and also their successors in the work of Derrida and Levinas. He suggests that we do not simply proceed to design and use our tools differently...