This book questions the nature of the business and social information systems so ubiquitous in contemporary life. Linking positivism, individualism, and market-fundamentalist economics at the root of these systems, it critiques the philosophical ground of this triumvirate as fundamentally against nature. Connecting counter-philosophies of the subject as a natural part of existence, with more collectivist and ecological economics, it presents a historical critique of the development of the academic field of information systems and offers a complex view of the nature of Nature through which we might reshape our approach to technology and to our economies to overcome the existential threat of climate change. As such, it will appeal to philosophers, social theorists, and scholars of science and technology studies with interests in the environment and ecology, as well as those working in the field of information systems.
List of Tables
1. A Transdisciplinary Approach
2. The Problem with Digital
3. The Future Does Not Exist
4. The World in a New Light
5. A Theoretical Manifesto for Green IT
Index
Biography
David Kreps is Lecturer in the J.E. Cairnes School of Business and Economics at NUI Galway, Ireland. His books include Bergson, Complexity and Creative Emergence; Technology and Intimacy: Choice or Coercion; and Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment.
‘Kreps brilliantly demonstrates how strongly IS (information systems) research has been and still is influenced by a positivist view of the world … Instead, Kreps proposes to borrow from Bergson’s and Whitehead’s process-relational philosophy, from moral philosophy and from complexity theory, to claim that the libertarian argument for the neoliberal digital capitalist society runs counter to the reality of the natural world of which we are a part.’ – Frantz Rowe, European Journal of Information Systems
