Lucas Introna

Lucas D. Introna (born 1961) is Professor of Organisation, Technology and Ethics at the Lancaster University Management School. He is a scholar within the Social Study of Information Systems field. His research is focused on the phenomenon of technology. Within the area of technology studies he has made significant contributions to our understanding of the ethical and political implications of technology for society.

Work

Early on in his career Introna was concerned with the way managers incorporated information in support of managerial practices (such as planning, decision-making, etc.). In this work he provided an account of the manager as an always already involved and entangled actor (which is always to a greater or lesser extent already compromised and configured) in contrast to the traditional normative model of the manager as a rational objective free agent that can choose to act or not act in particular ways. Later on his work shifted to a more critical appraisal of technology itself. He, together with co-workers, published a number of critical evaluations of information technology including search engines

In his book Management, Information and Power,[3] Introna argued that most management education is normatively based (i.e. telling managers how they ought to act), yet managers' organisational reality is mostly based on the ongoing play of power and politics, as has been shown by Henry Mintzberg^[4] (See also his recent book Managing). Thus, instead of using information to inform rationality (as the traditional normative models assume) information is rather most often deployed as a resource in organisational politics. This fact, Introna argues, requires an understanding of the relationship between information and power (as suggested in the work of Michel Foucault) rather than information and rationality, as traditionally assumed in the mainstream management literature.

Phenomenological and technology

Drawing on

The ethics and politics of technology

Introna (with a variety of co-workers) has developed a variety of detailed empirical studies of the

Sociomateriality and the ethics of things

More recently Introna has suggested that if we are cyborgs, as argued by Donna Haraway and others, then our ethical relationships with the inanimate material world needs to be reconsidered in a fundamental way. According to him this can only be achieved if we humans abandon a human centric ethical framework and opt for an ethical framework in which all beings are considered worthy of ethical consideration.^[9]

Selected publications

• 2017. On the making of sense in sensemaking: decentred sensemaking in the meshwork of life, Organization Studies, https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840618765579.
• 2016. Algorithms, Governance and Governmentality: On governing academic writing, Science, Technology and Human Values, 41(1):17-49
• 2013. Afterword: Performativity and the becoming of sociomaterial assemblages. In de Vaujany, F-X., & Mitev, N. (Eds.), Materiality and Space: Organizations, Artefacts and Practices.(pp. 330–342).Palgrave Macmillan.
• 2013. Otherness and the letting-be of becoming: or, ethics beyond bifurcation. In Carlile, P., Nicolini, D., Langley, A., & Tsoukas, H. (Eds.), How matter matters. (pp. 260–287). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• 2011. The Enframing of Code: Agency, originality and the plagiarist, Theory, Culture and Society, 28(6): 113-141.
• 2009. Ethics and the speaking of things, Theory, Culture and Society, 26(4): 398-419.
• 2008. Phenomenology, Organisation and Technology, Universidade Católica Editora, Lisbon. (with Fernando Ilharco and Eric Faÿ)
• 2007. Maintaining the Reversibility of Foldings: Making the ethics (politics) of information technology visible, Ethics and Information Technology, 9(1): 11-25
• 2006. The Meaning of Screens: Towards a phenomenological account of screenness, Human Studies, 29(1): 57-76. (with Fernando M. Ilharco)
• 2005. Disclosing the Digital Face: The ethics of facial recognition systems, Ethics and Information Technology, 7(2): 75-86
• 2002. The (im)possibility of ethics in the information age. Information and Organisation, 12(2):71-84.
• 2000. Shaping the Web: Why the politics of search engines matters, The Information Society, 16(3):169-185 (with Helen Nissenbaum )
• 1999. Privacy in the Information Age: Stakeholders, interests and values. Journal of Business Ethics, 22(1): 27-38 (with Nancy Poloudi)
• 1997. Privacy and the Computer: Why we Need Privacy in the Information Society. Metaphilosophy, 28(3): 259-275
• 1997. Management, Information and Power: A narrative of the involved manager, Macmillan, Basingstoke.

References

External links

• Lucas Introna's webpage at Lancaster University
• His publication archive
• His Google Scholar citation page
• Research Gate entry