Document (#28587)

Editor

Avgerou, C. u. R.L. La Rovere

Title

Information systems and the economies of innovation

Imprint

Cheltenham, UK : Edward Elgar

Year

2003

Pages

219 S

Isbn

1-84376-018-5

Footnote

Rez. in: JASIST 56(2005) no.8, S.889-890 (J. Warner): "This work is a collection of papers, reflective and theoretical, rather than primarily empirical, from scholars in information systems and economies, with discursive rather than formal modes of argument and presentation. The discipline of information systems (IS) is understood to have developed as codified knowledge about appropriate procedures for the development of customized information and communication technology (ICT) applications. The editors recognize that, with the displacement of customized applications by purchased packages, IS lost its main utility as a prescription for professional practice in the 1990s. The need for the scholarly community to establish its continuing value and to survive might be orte motivation for the increasing resort to theory. A difference in perspective between IS and economies is acknowledged: economiet take an outside-in approach to the results of innovation while IS focuses an the process of innovation. Recognition does not extend to synthesis, and a dynamic by which the process of Innovation both generates and is compelled by the resulting sociotechnical environment is not isolated. The literature of information science is not cited-other writers have noted the analogies between the subjects and disjunctions between the disciplines of IS and information science (Ellis, Allen, & Wilson, 1999)-but interdisciplinary dialogue is advocated. For information science readers, the interest of the work lies in the analogies between topics treated and the emerging theoretical reflection an them. Theory seems to have emerged primarily as a response to empirical difficulties, particularly contradictions between expectations and reality, and can reproduce the divides which motivated it. Empirical generalizations are not distinguished from the motivating forces which created the phenomena covered by those generalizations. For instance, the social constructivist perspective which argues that impact of technology is a matter of interpretation by human actors according to their social conditions, and which acknowledges the interpretive flexibility of a technology in use, is introduced, but technology is not fully recognized as a radical human construction, "organs of the human brain, created by the human hand" (Marx, 1973, p. 706; Warner, 2004), and the notion of impact is retained. The productivity paradox, understood as the weak correlation between investment in ICT and commercial success, forms a recurrent concern. A simple response might that the commercial value of a technology lies in the way it is used. More sophisticatedly the paradox could be regarded as an artifact of the apparent rigor and closeness, particularly temporal closeness, of studies and could be reinterpreted as a productivity effect, corresponding to a transition cost. The conclusion does not recall the distinction between invention, innovation, and diffusion, promised in the preface, and invention tends to be treated as if it were exogenous. The most interesting insights emerge from accounts of cited papers, particularly Ciborra's view of technology as being assimilated to the social by the device of hospitality and Orlikowski's reflections an technology.
Could a dynamic be constructed, in dialectical response to the theorizing presented, which draws an classic sources in political economy and which links micro-processes and macro-results? For Marx, the "basic logie of the capitalist mode of production ... [was] expansion, growth, enlarged reproduction, through a substitution of living by dead labour" (Marx, 1981, p. 13). With ICTs, we are dealing primarily with semiotic rather than physical labor, but a similar substitution of machine for direct human labor can be detected. The individual actors engaged in innovation encounter considerable risks, but collectively produce advances in social productivity: The much greater costs that are always involved in an enterprise based an new inventions, compared with later establishments that rise up an its ruins, ex suis ossibus. The extent of this is so great that the pioneering entrepreneurs generally go bankrupt, and it is only their successors who flourish.. . . Thus it is generally only the most worthless and wretched kind of money-capitalists that draw the greatest profit from all new developments of the universal labour of the human spirit and their social application by combined labour. (Marx, 1981, p. 199). Acknowledging the risks of innovation reveals the resistance of small entities to innovation as more rational for their survival than the scholarly prescriptions of the value of innovation for competitive advantage. The comparative advantage derivable from innovation can itself be understood from the relation of machinery to the direct human labor it supplants: As machinery comes into general use in a particular branch of production, the social value of the machinery product sinks down to its individual value, and the following law asserts itself: surplus-value does not arise from the labour-power that has been replaced by the machinery, but from the labour-power actually employed in working with the machinery. (Marx, 1976, p. 530) The more sophisticated theoretical and historical framework can both explain and dissolve the productivity paradox. The risks of Innovation limit rewards to pioneers, but, over time, their activities raise the productivity of labor: Consider, for instance, the contrast between the amount of direct human labor and the costs of that labor involved in Che copying of documents by hand, with a subsequent oral collation, in a mid-19th century legal practice (Melville, 1997) with modern technologies for copying files. In conclusion, the interest of the collection to information science lies in the further revelation of analogous concerns in another discipline, in the internal realization of the theoretical poverty of that discipline, and even, at points, that the control over processes of innovation offered by standard approaches was illusory, and in the emergence, not yet in fully articulated form, of a more sophisticated perspective."

Theme

Information Resources Management

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