The spirit never dies

Received: 3 October 2005 Accepted: 3 October 2005 I met Claudio as late as the year 2000. We had known one another by name for some time and we had had the occasional exchange of e-mails and a few telephone calls but did not happen to meet in person, as we operated in slightly different fields. I deeply regret that. Claudio will surely remain an important intellectual figure in the interdisciplinary field of administrative sciences in which IS, Organization Studies, Sociology and Economics are but major components. However, Claudio was, above all, an intensive personality, with a strong oral aura and numerous penetrating comments on all those minute details that compose the fabric of everyday life. These qualities made him both an exceptional and fascinating character. The vivid memory of his strong oral aura is certainly responsible for my feeling of unreality, which I every now and then get, when I think that he is gone forever. Forever? Till the end of time? So difficult for humans to grasp. ‘Time is but the moving image of eternity’, I had cited for him in English Plato’s words, a couple of times. Once he asked me whether I could cite them in classic Greek. I did. He smiled and said: beautiful, although the only sound I seem to recognize is of the word ‘chronos’. Back in time, I came into contact with Claudio’s work in the early and mid nineties when ‘Teams, Markets and Systems’ made its breakthrough. I also used the two other books he had edited during the same period (one on Strategy and ICT, the other on Groupware) in my teaching both at the graduate and postgraduate levels. While I was at Umea University, Sweden as a visiting professor in the second half of 1997, Kristo Ivanov handed me what I now judge to be an early version of Claudio’s De Profundis paper, which I found very stimulating. Around that period, Claudio’s thought shifted a bit away from his earlier concerns and showed an interest in Heideggerian philosophy. He gradually became seriously engaged with Heidegger’s thought, sought to understand Heideggerian philosophy in all its depth and let that understanding bear upon the ways by which we approach key issues associated with how technologies of information and communication become integrated in contemporary institutional life. I often recall him during the days at LSE with the original, German version of one or another of Heidegger’s books. We had discussions on how we understand and interpret Heidegger and one or another argument caused by my recurrent claim that its importance notwithstanding Being and Time could be misleading as the dominant signpost to Heidegger’s thinking. I did not expect him to know my more than a decade old work on Heidegger and (re)presentation (vorstellung). He had. When I showed my surprise at this, he burst into laugher and said: Jannis, that’s why you have been hired here. I do not think that he meant that literally but his reaction was so typical of Claudio’s personality. We read and got inspiration from Heidegger but we did not stay exclusively within the highly elegant and deep yet austere province of Heideggerian thought. Over the last 4 or 5 years of his life, Claudio (together with Ole Hanseth) was leading a group of scholars at LSE and the University of Oslo who studied the double-edged character of European Journal of Information Systems (2005) 14, 467–469 & 2005 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved 0960-085X/05 $30.00