Mathiassen, Lars

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Scandinavian Journal of Information SystemsVolume 9 | Issue 1 Article 31997The Infurgic ManifestoLars MathiassenAalborg University, Denmark, larsm@cs.auc.dkFollow this and additional works at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/sjisThis material is brought to you by the Journals at AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). It has been accepted for inclusion in Scandinavian Journal ofInformation Systems by an authorized administrator of AIS Electronic Library (AISeL). For more information, please contact elibrary@aisnet.org.Recommended CitationMathiassen, Lars (1997) "The Infurgic Manifesto," Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems: Vol. 9 : Iss. 1 , Article 3.Available at: http://aisel.aisnet.org/sjis/vol9/iss1/3© Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, 1997, 9(1):45–46All of us that participated in the 17thIRIS at Syöte remember the very nice at-mosphere, the comfortable facilities, thelarge sauna, the most beautifull land-scape, and the long, bright nights withdiscussions and friendship. Our col-leagues from Oulu did a magnificent jobof creating a truly romantic environmentfor our annual meeting. Another quite ro-mantic element in that IRIS was theworkshop organized by Markku Nur-minen, Tone Bratteteig, and Kristin Braaon a proposal for a new discipline: Infur-gy.Obviously, this was good entertain-ment. The presenters did a good job, theideas were challenging, and some of theaudience reacted quite strongly (includ-ing myself). But there was also an ele-ment of seriousness present. When youthought of Markku’s earlier work on hu-man-centered information systems andwhen you knew of the Laboris projectyou couldn’t help feeling, that this wasnot just for fun. We were confronted withambitions and quite concrete ideas onhow to organize ourselves into a new sci-entific endeavor.I sympathize with the intentions ofthe manifesto (published in this forum inVol. 8, No. 1). We should as profession-als be concerned with the harmful impli-cations that a purely mechanistic ap-proach to our field can have on ourselves,our students, users of IT and society atlarge. We should not primarily see com-puters as substitutes for human activitybut rather as tools and media we canwork and play with as humans to im-prove our lives. We should not only usetechnical, reifying descriptions of newdesigns, but instead we should under-The Infurgic ManifestoLars MathiassenCIT & Computer Science at Aalborg UniversityFredrik Bajers Vej 7E, DK-9220 Aalborg Ølarsm@cs.auc.dk1Mathiassen: The Infurgic ManifestoPublished by AIS Electronic Library (AISeL), 1997L. Mathiassen 46stand and design new systems as intinsicparts of social environments. We shouldunderstand and design systems and theprocesses through which they are devel-oped or adapted in context. Hence, as anethical framework for researchers in In-formation Systems I have only minor ob-jections to the content of the Infurgicmanifesto and if you initiate a compari-son with ACM’s code of ethics you willindeed find great familiarity and consen-sus between the two.But as a description of, and proposalfor, a scientific discipline addressing “is-sues which relate work and information(technology) with each other” I object.Already given the existing institutionsgoverning our field we have too many,too loosely coupled settings in which thesame research problems and questionsare addressed. Focusing for instance onthe phenomenon: use and developmentof computer-based systems in organiza-tions (which is an essential part of Infor-mation Systems), the division of laborbetween Software Engineering, Compu-ter Science, and  Information Systems ismost unfortunate.To really understand and contributeto the use and development of computer-based systems in organizations we needas researchers and practitioners to dealwith the fundamental contradictions be-tween technology and man. We must un-derstand, in depth, the technology andthe opportunities and threats related to it,we must appreciate the social contextsand the specific domains in which tech-nology is used, and we must know howto combine and further develop the two. We should ask ourselves what con-stitutes the identy of our field, what is itsmost distinguishing feature. It is notwork. It is not information. It is the use ofinformation technology. Without tech-nology we become organization theo-rists, social scientists, or anthropologists.We loose our identity. So in a way, tech-nology is more important to us than workand organization—as long as we  re-member that it is not technology as such,but its use we are concerned with.As a proposal for a scientific disci-pline I read the Infurgic Manifesto as anattempt to make a seperatist, ethicallybased movement within the InformationSystems community. Instead, we need toopen for a much more intensive and con-structive dialogue between the Informa-tion Systems people and people fromComputer Science and Engineering.Here in Scandinavia we probably havethe most optimal conditions for develop-ing this dialogue in teaching, researchand practice. We should include into ourmidsummernight dreams images thatcould help us work in that direction.2Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems, Vol. 9 [1997], Iss. 1, Art. 3http://aisel.aisnet.org/sjis/vol9/iss1/3

The Infurgic Manifesto

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The Infurgic Manifesto

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