ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with a brief overview of the research approaches in information systems as an academic field before turning to the deeper roots of its malaise in individualism and its looming consequences. The three branches of Information Systems research in academia prove to be a useful lens through which to understand the field: positivism, interpretivism, and the critical stance taken by this book. The ‘scientism’ at the root of positivism is examined, and the positivism in Information Systems critiqued as a historically contingent response to the ascendancy of a new brand of economics in business schools after the Second World War. But the computational market-fundamentalist form of economics sponsored in the 1950s (and applied by governments since the 1970s) centred around notions of the individual rational actor as an information processor. The philosophical underpinning of methodological and possessive individualism in this approach is exposed and its influence upon the development – long before computing – of the science of ecology and our notion of ecosystems is introduced.
