It is necessary for an academic field to reflect, from time to time, on its intellectual state, revisit its origins, and take a critical look at the dominant traits of the knowledge it produces. Such exercises often uncover debilitating biases hidden in the taken‐for‐granted “normal” discourse of the field. In this book Bryant traces technocratic biases of the IS field in early appropriations of the fundamental concepts of information, communication, and technology in seminal publications (e.g. Shannon and Weaver's theory of communications) in the intellectual circles of cybernetics at the end of the Second World War. He also reminds us of early contestations and controversies surrounding the emergence of the technocratic perspective, referring mainly to the work of Jacques Ellul. References to old masters are in abundance: Bertalanffy, Churchman, Emery and Trist, Bell. Undoubtedly the tracing of such trend‐setting work is valuable for young researchers and, hopefully, a welcome influence for PhD programmes that tend to produce theses with bibliographies that scarcely include anything published earlier than the 1990s.
Remarkable also is Bryant's effort to associate the narrow technology and market discourse that has become dominant in mainstream IS research with similar trends in analyses of contemporary society (Bell, Castells, etc.) and development policy, such as in information society studies and policy. In this respect, this book makes an insightful contribution by identifying ICT as the “rational technology” of “liquid modernity” par excellence. Bryant draws these concepts from the work of Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most significant critical sociologists, and suggests that his penetrating observations of contemporary society may provide potent underpinnings for the social study of ICT. Surprisingly, although IS research has drawn conceptual grounding from the main sociologists of late modernity, such as Giddens and Beck, it has rarely turned to Bauman's work, which has influenced both Giddens and Beck and is, arguably, more challenging in its criticality. This book makes a start in breaking this neglect and demonstrates the critical concepts and arguments that can be drawn for IS research from Bauman's recent sociological analyses. Indicative of the critical stance towards the IS field Bryant takes on the basis of Bauman's concepts is his suggestion that the studies of ICT have formed the paradigmatic liquid discipline, whereby “the narrated reality and the narrated reason have developed in tandem, so that what at first was a technical reality with a technical reason has now become a dominant aspect of social life”.
The book attempts to go further than making a critique of mainstream IS research and technocratic policy. It argues for the need for launching “informatics” as a field of study of information, communication and technology of “essentially social character”. Here I have some reservations. First I am not convinced that a change of name to informatics will result in the conceptual and theoretical re‐orientation of the IS field. And the term informatics, as Bryant himself repeatedly acknowledges, is already used almost as a synonym to computer science in Scandinavian countries, continental Europe and, increasingly, the UK. This is why, in his efforts to create an inter‐disciplinary discourse on the social character of ICT, Rob Kling and his associates named their movement “social informatics”.
Second, I am surprised that this book does not acknowledge and engage more substantially with the recent and ongoing research streams of the social study of ICT within the IS field. Since the early controversies of technology‐driven social discourse, that this book so excellently reviews, there has been an increasingly more visible sub‐field in IS that follows closely developments in critical social theory. The few references to Latour and the IFIP 8.2 publications that are included in this book hardly do justice to the multiple “abnormal” voices that have opened up a research agenda beyond the managerial studies that see ICT as a tool in market rationality.
These shortcomings do not diminish the significance of the main contribution of this book, which I believe lies in introducing Bauman's analytical concept of liquid modernity, thus suggesting a new and potentially rich perspective for the social study of ICT. I do hope that the book will be read widely and will inspire research that will build on Bauman's theory. Whether such work is hosted within the institutions of an academic field called IS or informatics is not important to me.
