ALOIS*2005 Conference background
Background
The complexities of the organisational practice of information systems
put demands on research and knowledge as well as on practice. There are many
conceptual approaches aiming at describing and explaining these complex phenomena.
Where do we find the promising ones? Some approaches emphasise the action concept.
Without acknowledging actions, it seems difficult to create good scientific
descriptions and explanations. Although such approaches may have differing
theoretical perspectives, they have a unifying interest in the action concept
and its explanatory power. Examples of such approaches are activity theory,
actor network theory, structuration theory, conversation analysis, and language/action
theory.
There may be other approaches with theoretical influences of more or
less explicit action orientation, such as social phenomenology, symbolic interactionism,
ethnomethodology, soft systems theory, critical social theory, hermeneutics,
social semiotics, socio-pragmatism, situated cognition theory, practice theory
and affordance theory. Together with this interest in action comes an interest
in the many related issues, such as knowledge, language, communication, social
interaction, social institutions, coordination, artefacts, power, and values.
The purpose of this conference is to bring together researchers and practitioners
with an interest in action-theoretic approaches for understanding information
systems and their relations to organisations.
Building on the two successful ALOIS conferences in 2003 and 2004 we now arrange the 3rd International ALOIS Conference. The aim is to create a fruitful meeting between different research traditions with action-theoretic affinities. We hope that researchers and practitioners coming from different traditions will benefit from this attempt of crossing borders and elaborating syntheses.
Information
about previous ALOIS conferences (including on-line proceedings)
can be found at http://www.vits.org/konferenser/alois2003/
and http://www.vits.org/konferenser/alois2004/
Please have a look at last years’ proceedings! For the purpose of cumulative growth, we encourage authors to try and relate their submissions to one or more of previous years’ papers.
