Claudio Ciborra

Research Interests

Since my University years, my research has focused on the study of the relationship between technology (initially production automation, subsequently various forms of information technology applications) and private and public organizations.

If that focus has remained stable over time, the perspective selected to look at the issues has changed, evolved and re-volved. Given the nature of the problem, the approach has been always interdisciplinary. A main methodological concern has been to bring into the automation and information systems areas the results of more grounded disciplines, such as economics, sociology, and more recently, philosophy.

Originally, the approach adopted was strictly socio-technical (systems theory and the decision making perspective introduced by H. Simon). The analysis of complexity and organizational noise lead to advances in the socio-technical analysis methodology of work organization (published in Human Relations in 1984). Issues in implementation of IT innovations were analysed using the power perspective (Crozier, Friedberg).

Subsequently, considerable ground work has been done in developing the theoretical foundations and applications of the transaction costs theory to the whole field of information systems. Pioneering results were achieved in this direction in the period 1980 - 1984, and later published in the book : Teams, Markets and Systems, Cambridge University Press (now in its third printing of the paperback version) .

Open issues in implementation, which could not be dealt with by Institutional Economics, or even the economics of social costs, lead to the adoption of an organizational learning perspective and to a conceptual critique of the notion of opportunism (already formulated in a manuscript at Harvard University in 1987).

Further research on learning and high turbulent organizations in the high tech industries lead to numerous works that analyse strategic alliances and new forms of work organizations in ways that go beyond transaction costs economics (a paper was recently published in Organization Science under the auspices of Prof. I. Nonaka introducing the notion of Platform Organizations).

Issues of bounded rationality and limited learning lead to a revision of the notion of strategic information systems and the appreciation of the processes of bricolage and improvisation during systems development.

More recently, the increasing penetration of IT in the everyday life has induced a new reflection on the whole notion of technology, everyday practices of use and unexpected consequences of implementation processes.

The adoption of a phenomenological perspective has proven to be illuminating in opening up new insights and making urgent the critique of other management concepts in good currency such as strategic alignment or the whole role of methods in systems development.

page last updated 7 March, 2001