ABSTRACT
This chapter builds on and extends the previous one through tackling in detail the conception harboured by much of the Social Study of Information Systems that complex organisational information systems do not ‘travel’. Marc Berg (1997), for instance, suggests that the difficulties in transporting such systems from one place to another arise because they become fixed in ‘time and space’. His argument is that software becomes so thoroughly imbued with the local idiosyncrasies of its place(s) of production that it only works at the site(s) for which it was designed and built. Scholars in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Information Systems (IS) research have spent much time describing how building anything other than the simplest artefact produces this kind of particularisation. There are dozens of such examples in STS and IS research of how Manufacturing Resource Planning (MRP) systems, finance sector administrative systems, hospital information systems and, to use Berg’s example, expert systems resist transfer to other settings.1
