Australian Eclecticism and Theorizing in Information Systems Research

explains a variety of IS research approaches found in Australia, and relates them the the history of IS research and teaching in Australia, and to Australian culture in genera

Towards an Autopoietic Perspective on Knowledge Management

The field of Knowledge Management promises considerable benefits to organisations attempting to manage their intellectual resources, but what is the basis for this claim? In this paper it will be argued that unless the field of Knowledge Management (KM) first addresses the fundamentals of that which it claims to manage, it runs the risk of being discarded as just another failed management fad that promised much but delivered little. It will be argued that autopoietic theory, as developed by Maturana and Varela (1980), offers a useful epistemological basis from which KM may develop as a discipline

Enabling Knowledge Sharing: New Challenges for Information Systems

Drawing from a longitudinal field study on an IS development in the Investment Banking industry, in this paper we explore the implications emerging from the IS role in the provision of knowledge-based services to clients. By analysing the unique process by which the' IS under study' has been developed, we aim to identify and explain factors contributing to the IS's resounding success and especially its role as an enabler of knowledge sharing between the Company's financial analysts and clients. The paper aims to contribute to a deeper understanding of underlying processes of IS-organisation co-evolution that made the IS a success

Can IS Save the World? Collaborative Technologies for Eco-Mobilisation

This paper adopts a transdisciplinary perspective to studying the use of collaborative technologies for environmental collaboration among diverse stakeholders, mobilised towards creating and achieving shared environmental goals. Environmental collaboration is a complex phenomenon involving a multitude of stakeholders and resources often dispersed across vast geographically, politically and culturally diverse areas. The study contextualises the environmental problem situation in Australia and Thailand, and considers the multifaceted emergence of environmental collaboration enacted by various local Environmental Non- Governmental Organisations (ENGO). A research approach, based on the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is adopted. By retracing the associations and the complex webs of translations taking place in the environmental actor-networks of diverse stakeholders and collaborative technologies, the study reveals the emerging roles and limitations of collaborative technologies as mediators of eco-mobilisation

Having a Say: Voices for all the Actors in AN T Research?

This article explores issues associated with giving non-human actors a voice of their own in actor-network theory based research. What issues arise in doing so? Does doing so increase understanding of the issue to hand, bring to life and make more accessible and interesting the stories of these actors? Or does this anthropomorphism detract from the issues at hand? The authors discuss these broader issues and then present findings from an ANT field study which investigated the implementation of institutional repositories and their relations with the spread of open access to scholarly publishing. This paper experiments with allowing some of the non-human actors to speak for themselves. The authors conclude with a discussion which opens the debate: does giving voice to non-human actors bring them to life and make them better understood as intimately entangled with each other and human actors in the socio-material practices of the everyday? And what are the challenges in doing so