Using Complexity Science to effect a paradigm shift in Information Systems for the 21st century

摘要

Thomas Kuhn (1962) is famous for his descriptions of science as consisting of long periods of 'normal puzzle solving' separated by brief periods of 'paradigm shift'. Computers have been around for half a century, with Information Systems (IS) in firms existing for several decades. Increasingly, we see various observers complaining about normal puzzle solving in IS (Ciborra, 1994; Orlikowski and Iacono, 2001) at a time when people increasingly spend time in virtual worlds - business people work more and more in virtual teams (VTs), while there are now special programs to rescue teenagers from total emersion in virtual worlds.