AbstractsPhilosophy & Theology

Problems of communication in the interplay between the information systems professional and their clients have resulted in a preponderance of methods and frameworks of structured interaction that have failed to produce consistently successful outcomes, and in the author’s professional experience are ignored as impractical to confront the chaos of the day to day micro level that shape outcomes. What seems to be more germane to understand in the problem of communication is the relations of power between participants. And, if we accept that perspective of power as a relation that is important to understand in analysing the problem of communication, we must necessarily choose to delve further than the mainstream IS literature where the power of A over B, or the power of A to enable B dominates, because such trajectories ignore three important aspects. Firstly, the entanglement of these IS researchers and authors themselves in a relation of power with power as an object which is itself party to rhetoric that seems to be concerned with ethical or partisan debate (cf. Lucas, 1984; Stahl, 2008, Rowlands and Kautz, 2013). Secondly, in treating power as an object, the network of possible complex relations where power could be said to happen is bypassed in favour of a simpler actor-centric model. Thirdly, and most importantly for this research, is the possibility that power must necessarily not only occur in the skills and techniques of the information systems professional (techne) but also in the interplay of knowledges (episteme) that are deployed at the times of communication with their embedded rationalities (cf. Bjorn-Andersen and Eason, 1980; Law, 1991; and Baunsgaard and Clegg 2013). Broadly speaking for us, power-relations are deployed in the potential interplay between discourses, where discourse defines the boundaries of potentially competing, simultaneously operating and conflicted epistemologies. In order to accommodate these points, we determined to conduct an interpretative epistemological analysis of the possible power-relations that the information systems professional may be subject to. To do this we broadly sought to follow Foucault (1969) and conduct an archaeology of the knowledge, obtained by open ended interview, of the narrative histories of eight ISD professionals, who came from a diverse set of backgrounds and perspectives spanning project management, systems programming, systems and business analysis, technology and business management, medicine, and systems infrastructure and networking. The approach we took was firstly to excavate their narratives for significant epistemological elements, elements that seem to hold epistemological significance for the person, horizontally identifying shared and non-shared elements as well. These elements are then vertically transposed to a maximum available set of possible epistemological meanings independent of their origin in the narrative, with identification of groupings of lexical siblings and antonyms becoming the discursive formations. This allows us to…