Abstract
This paper relates stories instrumental in shaping the career of an individual and which have also contributed to shaping of the IS field in general and the ‘Scandinavian Socio-Technical (S/T) Information Systems Research Tradition’ in particular. The method in this paper is an autoethnography (Lanamäki, 2015) of Niels Bjørn-Andersen from Copenhagen Business School (CBS), an S/T researcher who started his career in Information Systems at CBS on 1 September 1969, at a time when the IS field for all practical purposes did not exist. It is written as a dialogue that includes both the confessional voice of the autoethnographer and the questioning voice of a younger researcher, the second author, who wants to bridge S/T into the future. The main contributions of this paper are to provide: 1) insights into career development in IS in general and in one of the Scandinavian IS pioneers in particular; 2) a historic account of some of the key events in the early days of S/T IS in Scandinavia; 3) an account of the experiences and the challenges in creating a new research field such as IS; and 4) a summary of Niels’s key learnings hopefully relevant to young and mid-career IS researchers.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 4 |
| Journal | Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems |
| Volume | 29 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| Pages (from-to) | 79–118 |
| ISSN | 0905-0167 |
| Publication status | Published - 2017 |
Keywords
- Scandinavian IS research
- Socio-technical tradition
- Academic career
- Autoethnography
- Historical method