Description

So says at least Kalle Lyytinen, our guest today. He is the head of the Case mafia – or so at least Jan says – and the main referent of the infamous Erdős-Bacon-Lyytinen number – or so at least Nick says. We pick Kalle’s brain a little bit to learn more about the origins of the information systems field and what is was really like in the 80s and 90s. We also talk about publishing in the old days and now, the debates in our field at that time and why they stopped, and what we can learn from the past that helps us advance as scholars in the future.

Episode Reading List

• Lyytinen, K. (1985). Implications of Theories of Language for Information Systems. MIS Quarterly, 9(1), 61-76.
• Saunders, C. (2005). Editor’s Comments: Looking for Diamond Cutters. MIS Quarterly, 29(1), iii-viii.
• Lee, A. S. (1999). Inaugural Editor’s Comments. MIS Quarterly, 23(1), v-xi.
• Auramäki, E., Lehtinen, E., & Lyytinen, K. (1988). A Speech-act-based Office Modeling Approach. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 6(2), 126-152.
• Hirschheim, R., Klein, H. K., & Lyytinen, K. (1995). Information Systems Development and Data Modeling: Conceptual and Philosophical Foundations. Cambridge University Press.
• Langefors, B. (1980). Infological Models and Information User Views. Information Systems, 5(1), 17-32.
• Scheer, A.-W. (1992). Architecture of Integrated Information Systems – Foundations of Enterprise Modelling. Springer.
• Davis, G. B., & Olson, M. H. (1985). Management Information Systems: Conceptual Foundations, Structure and Development (2nd ed.). McGraw-Hill.
• Hirschheim, R. (1985). Information Systems Epistemology: An Historical Perspective. In E. Mumford, R. Hirschheim, G. Fitzgerald, & A. T. Wood-Harper (Eds.), Research Methods in Information Systems (pp. 13-35). North Holland.
• Chandler, A. D. (1990). Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise. MIT Press.
• Popper, K. R. (1996). The Open Society and its Enemies: Hegel and Marx. Routledge.
• Hegel, G. W. F. (1971). Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Suhrkamp (in German).
• Habermas, J. (1984). Theory of Communicative Action, Volume 1: Reason and the Rationalization of Society. Heinemann.
• Lyytinen, K., & Hirschheim, R. (1988). Information Systems as Rational Discourse: An Application of Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action. Scandinavian Journal of Management Studies, 4(1-2), 19-30.
• Lyytinen, K., & King, J. L. (2004). Nothing At The Center? Academic Legitimacy in the Information Systems Field. Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 5(6), 220-246.
• King, J. & Lyytinen, K. (Eds.) (2006): Information Systems: The State of the Field. John Wiley & Sons.
• Pearl, J. (2019). The Seven Tools of Causal Inference, with Reflections on Machine Learning. Communications of the ACM, 62(3), 54-60.
• Chipidza, W., & Tripp, J. (2018). The Social Structure of the Information Systems Collaboration Network: Centers of Influence and Antecedents of Tie Formation. Communications of the Association for Information Systems, 42(16), 431-454.