Whither Information Science in France?

Information science (IS) in France forms part of an inter-discipline named 'Information & Communication Sciences' (ICS), officially recognized as an academic discipline in the French higher education system in 1972. There is a diffuse belief among its academic community that the Anglophone conception of IS is very different from theirs because it is supposedly rooted in Shannon's mathematical theory of communication while the French conception is more rooted in the social sciences and humanities, owing to the literary origins of its founding figures (Robert Escarpit, Roland Barthes, Jean Meyriat). However, a review of the international literature shows that there are no profound distinctions in theories and paradigms underlying research in IS whether undertaken by French or by Anglophone researchers. The differences that do exist are surface level, due mainly to political and institutional factors. These factors also account for the poor state of IS in France today. Indeed, the institutional recognition and development of the field was not grounded upon the foundational works of the pioneers of documentation and IS in the late 19 and early 20 centuries (Paul Otlet, Henri Lafontaine, Suzanne Briet). Another factor which has had a lasting impact on the French IS landscape were the inconsistent government policies implemented from the early 1970s till the late 1990s which led to a narrowing down of focus of IS to Scientific and technical information (STI) only, thus orienting the field towards a technological agenda. This in turn affected the direction higher education training and research took in the first three decades. Finally, but not the least adverse factor, the cohabitation of IS with communication science in the same inter-discipline has made it more difficult for the former to affirm its identity and exist as a recognized academic field in France. A word on methodology Our study is based mainly on literature reviews and on our personal knowledge of the field's dynamics. Haven first been a PhD student in the early nineties, then an associate professor since the late nineties, we have had the chance to witness firsthand how the field is evolving in France. This paper is also a contracted and modified version of two publications to appear (Ibekwe-SanJuan 2012a and Ibekwe-SanJuan 2012b). 1. Information Science as an instrument of the cold war era Palermiti & Polity (2002) and Salaün (1991, 1993) gave accounts of how the French IS landscape was shaped in its first two decades of existence (1974-1994). We will update these studies to the current period (2012) and look at other criteria such as governance and research assessment which have become significant factors in shaping the landscape and future of IS in France. Information science (IS) as an academic discipline emerged officially in many western countries in the period following WWII. IS was seen by many governments (USA, France, Germany, UK) as a strategic tool with which to gain scientific, technological and military supremacy. Fayet-Scribe (1997) observed that “After the end of World War I, in fact, there was an awareness in France of the necessity for a national effort in the realm of what we now call technical and scientific information. Thanks to its wealth of bibliographies, German science had created a monopoly situation, and closure of the borders had halted the flow of publications, a penury that brought home the importance of access to information (Gablot,1991). » Indeed, scientists, especially chemists, enjoyed privileges in the period preceding the Nazi regime in Germany and some were closely associated with the Nazi’s rise to power. In the United States, the launching of Sputnik in 1957 by the exUSSR spurred the federal government to boost research on information technology. The conference on Information science held in Washington in 1958 launched IS as a field of training and research in the US. Ten years earlier (1948), a similar conference had been organized in London by the Royal Society also calling for specific efforts to handle STI, this laid the grounds for the Washington conference of 1958. Federal agencies (NSF, NHS, Library of Congress) and industries became involved in research and development of infrastructures to handle STI (Burke, 2007). In France, the public policy on STI in the post-WWII period (1960 up to the early 1990s) was geared towards developing national information and communication infrastructures (telecommunication networks, servers) which will enable France to Published in The ASIST 75 Anniversary History Perspective. The history of ASIS&T and Information Science and Technology worldwide – October 27 Baltimore 2012, pp. 83-95. gain information independence from other nations. Several state agencies bearing the suffix "Information scientifique et technique" (Scientific and technical information) were created. The telecommunications, the nuclear energy industry (CEA) and the Defense ministry were closely involved in policy making for STI while the academic community was largely held at bay. The competition between government agencies and expert groups tendering advice on STI policy was not helped by another political factor: the change of power at the very top of the French state brought by elections. 1.1 Impact of successive governmental policies on IS in France Between the mid-sixties and the mid-nineties, three successive governments from different political parties governed France, each with its own ideas and “grand plan” for STI and for information and communication technology (ICT). Since these two concepts are assimilated with IS in the public's mind, the policies implemented impacted the evolution of the field in its first three decades of existence. The table below summarizes the focal points of these policies. Period Party President Information & communication policy 1959 1969 Gaullist Charles de Gaulle 'Plan calcul' (Grand plan for computation) 1969 1974 Gaullist Georges Pompidou Boutry report on dissemination of STI 1974 1981 Centrist Valéry Giscard D'Estaing 'Plan téléphone' (development of telecommunications infrastructure). The Nora-Minc report of 1978 launched the concept of “information society”, popularized by the media. Information was equated with grey petrol and energy, a precious physical matter to be transported. Influence of Shannon-Weaver's Mathematical Theory of Communication (MTC). This was also the period immediately following the official recognition of ICS as an academic discipline in the French higher education system (1972). 1981 – 1995 Socialist François Mitterand Focus on democratization of access to ICT, emphasis on scientific communication (publication) by the academic community. PARUSI program designed to boost research in information science (IS) within the ICS (Information & Communication Science) interdiscipline. 1995 2007 Gaullist Jacques Chirac From here onwards, the development of IS is governed more by the dynamics of the academic community than by explicit government policies. Table 1. Successive government policies and impact on IS between 1960-1995. In the reconstruction of the nation and the economy after WWII, the Gaullist party that ruled for fifteen years devised a “plan calcul” (a grand plan for computation). The “Rapport Boutry” of 1964 laid the foundations of a national policy on the dissemination of STI at a time when we were witnessing a growth in document production but without adequate storage and retrieval facilities. Not unlike the reaction of the US federal government following the launching of the Sputnik satellite by the ex-USSR, the Gaullist government in France saw STI as a tool with which to advance its political agenda and gain independence from the two superpowers – the ex-Soviet Union and the USA. In the post-WWII context of star wars, where countries were focused on arms building and nuclear power, the government set out to encourage the technical development of the STI sector. As Salaün (1991) pointed out, this had the advantage for the Gaullist government that it prevented any real debate since STI was presented as an issue of national sovereignty. Some of the earliest documentation centers were housed within the ministry of defense (CEDOCAR) and the center for atomic energy (CEA). This signified the shift of focus from “documentation” to STI and from the humanities to technology and industry. With the election of Valéry Giscard D’Estaing from the centrist party in 1974 came another change of policy on STI. The “plan calcul” promoted by the former Gaullist government was abandoned in favour of a “plan telephone” (a grand plan for 1 Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique. (The Commissary for Atomic Energy). 2 “Plan d’Aide à la Recherche Universitaire en Science de l’Information. » (Programme of Aid towards Scientific Research in Information Science). 3 The name of the political party built by Charles de Gaulle. 4 Political ideas assimilated with Charles de Gaulle’s republican party. 5 CEntre de DOCumentation des Armées (The documentation center of the army). Published in The ASIST 75 Anniversary History Perspective. The history of ASIS&T and Information Science and Technology worldwide – October 27 Baltimore 2012, pp. 83-95. telecommunication infrastructures). This change was made popular by the landmark “Nora-Minc” report of 1978, entitled “L’informatisation de la société” and destined for the president of the Republic. In this report, information was compared to energy, a resource of which the society was in dire need. Information was not being projected as something which had content, meaning and could be analyzed but rather as something which could be transported, whose volume could be measured, and whose influx can be observed. This view of information was heavily influenced by the Shannon-Weaver theory of mathematical communication which then became the basic theory of information and of IS, thus severing the links with library and documentation which until then had been the historical roots of the discipline. The progress encountered in computer science at that time made information processing more accessible. It was also in this report that the neologism “télématique”, a contraction of “télécommunications” and “informatique” (informatics) was coined. Salaün (1991:15) observed that “With this report, information gained a higher status and acquired its “lettres de noblesse”. However, its role was never clearly defined. The telecommunication industry which, owing to its development of telephone lines in rural France, suddenly became a prominent actor in the information sector in the late seventies, entertained the confusion between informatics and information. Databases, servers and big documentation centers were being compared to grey petrol (pétrole gris). Information was being assimilated with informatics and “telematics” and presented as a means to overcome the economic depression of the mid-seventies. Hence, information became an industry and the term ‘Information Society’ (société de l’information) became popular and “passe partout” from the 1980s. The arrival of the socialist government to power in 1981 with François Mitterand as president of France signaled yet another change in focus. Efforts were deployed towards the democratization of informatics and towards scientific communication. Jean-Pierre Chevènement, the then socialist minister of research and industry, convened a national conference in 1982 with the scientific community where the publication of scientific results became an obligation for the first time. The PARUSI plan was devised by the government to try and balance the “rapport de force” between information science and communication science within the new inter-discipline of “information and communication sciences” (ICS) but as history has showed, it failed. The fact that governmental policy on information was reduced to an instrumental and technical approach was also due to a small group of influential men from the sciences who were the thinkers and implementers of these policies such as Pierre Aigrain (nuclear physicist), Jacques-Emile Dubois (chemist) and Jacques Michel (chemist). Efforts were made towards creating bibliographic databases in physics and chemistry in order to gain independence from the American monopoly in these areas (Chemical abstracts, Inspec). The inconsistencies in policy owing to power shifts affected the epistemological and conceptual emancipation of the field negatively. The result, as Palermiti & Polity (2002) aptly observed, was that management of the IS sectors by the different French government displayed an unfortunate characteristic trait of the French administration: “a jacobine centralization, a policy of “pré-carré” undertaken by the different government agencies and a general absence of coordination between the different government bodies”. IS was delivered to special interest groups who influenced government policies for about forty years. 1.2 Impact on professional associations Fayet-Scribe (1997, 2000), and later Palermiti & Polity (2002) had observed that before WWII, library and documentation associations enjoyed a fruitful collaboration. Historic figures like Suzanne Briet, Eric and Georgette de Grolier were first librarians who became interested in other means of accessing bibliographic contents and making written material accessible to end users. They thus promoted the emergence of documentation from the more conservative and elitist librarianship. They were instrumental in effecting a “rapprochement” between the two professional bodies – librarians and the new documentalists. Despite their efforts, a breach appeared between librarians and documentalists in the post WWII period regardless of the fact that both professions had common roots and relied on the same fundamental concepts for designing and maintaining knowledge organization systems. The cause of the breach is institutional: librarians are state-employed civil servants, trained by special schools. They are guaranteed a job placement after their graduation whereas documentalists are technicians destined to work in the private sector. 6 The computerization of the society. 7 Its official recognition. 8 Became a household concept. 9 Power ratio or power share. 10 This refers to the “concept of a centralized Republic, with power concentrated in the national government, at the expense of local or regional governments” Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobin_(politics). 11 The French term for state trained and qualified librarians is “conservateurs” (conservatists), thus they are very reluctant to embrace changes especially those that involve relinquishing some of their protected turf to the public or to other professions. 12 A coming closer, akin to a reconciliation. Published in The ASIST 75 Anniversary History Perspective. The history of ASIS&T and Information Science and Technology worldwide – October 27 Baltimore 2012, pp. 83-95. When IS emerged as an academic field in the early seventies, only the documentation sector was somewhat associated with its constitution, thus leaving out archivists, librarians and museum curators who did not feel concerned by this academic discipline. A similar situation has been described by Buckland (1996) in the USA. He recalled the influential role played by the Chicago School of Library in orienting the development of the field towards librarianship rather than to IS in the mid-20 century. Williams (1997) also alludes to the rivalry between the American Library Association (ALA) and the Special Libraries Association (SLA) movement (the American counterpart of European documentation) in the 1930s-1960s. SLA finally lost the battle to be recognized as a distinct profession with special needs in training and in services to the public. The reason was that they were not proactive enough in the face of technology and in subject indexing despite the fact that a figure like Mortimer Taube, father of modern indexing techniques, was a prominent member of SLA. The so-called special librarians eventually became like general librarians. In fact, they received the same training since the ALA refused to implement specific teaching curricula in library schools for SLA (Williams, 1997). 1.3 Impact on higher education training Unsurprisingly, the incoherent government policies trickled down into the higher education system. Although, training programs for librarians, archivists and documentalists existed prior to the emergence of the ICS discipline, they were not integrated into the emerging IS field. Up until the year 2000s, it was difficult to find complete curricula in IS, i.e., going from undergraduate through graduate and post-graduate studies. Most IS diplomas are technically-oriented. The “Diplôme Universitaire de Technologie” (DUT) is a two year undergraduate diploma delivered by Institutes of Technology. Some universities offered a one year Masters’ degree course to students holding a Bachelor's degree in any other discipline. The earliest of such one year Master's degree was created in Grenoble in 1970 (Certificat de maîtrise d'informatique et documentation littéraire) and in Bordeaux in 1971. Bordeaux was also one of the rare universities to offer a complete university degree in ICS, going from undergraduate to post-graduate and doctoral studies (Tétu, 2002). Before the emergence of the ICS inter-discipline, IS courses were typically hosted by humanities departments (Literatures, History, Arts, Languages). Higher education curricula in IS are mostly focused on producing information professionals for the private sector. These professionals (mainly documentalists) in return make up of half of the teaching staff as adjunct professors, who bring the ‘on-the-field’ experience for future professionals. The results are rather unfortunate in terms of educational coherence and epistemological emancipation: IS was saddled with bits and pieces of courses gathering students from other disciplines. Each training was constructed as a beginner course in some IS specialty (Palermiti & Polity, 2002). However, this is not unique to IS in France. In other countries, it is also common for IS scholars to have majored in some other discipline before joining the field. This can foster interdisciplinary approaches but more often, constitutes a barrier to communication as we do not have the same conceptual approaches to common research problem nor do we employ the same terminology. Under pressure from the Bologna process, the French ministry of education instigated a series of reforms to put France’s higher education structure in conformity with the European system. This gave rise to the L-M-D reform put in place since 2002 which aligned all higher education degrees so as to fall into the three levels ‘Graduate-Masters-Doctorate'. The Institutes of Technology (IUTs) are still in place and delivering the two-year undergraduate technical diploma to students who afterwards have to apply to a university department to pursue a third year in order to obtain their bachelors’ degree and from there go on to a two-year masters’ degree. As IS rarely exists alone as a distinct specialty in its own department, it is difficult to say how many courses or departments offer courses in IS in France. With the notable exception of the ENSSIB in Lyon which is really a school for librarians, and the INTD in Paris, there are no such things as “Schools of Information Science” (iSchools) in France. 2. Influence of the systems-oriented paradigm in information science The consequence of the instrumentalization of IS by the successive government policies was that IS was seen as a field 13 Institut Universitaire de Technologie (IUT). 14 A series of agreements signed in 1999 in Bologna aimed at aligning the European Higher Education system in each member country. More details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_Process. 15 Licence-Master-Doctorate. 16 Ecoles Nationale Supérieure des Sciences de l’Information et des Bibliothèques. 17 Institut National des Techniques Documentaires. Published in The ASIST 75 Anniversary History Perspective. The history of ASIS&T and Information Science and Technology worldwide – October 27 Baltimore 2012, pp. 83-95. whose aim was to find technological solutions for processing STI. Salaün (1993) described this shift of focus from bibliography and documentation to STI in the following terms: “Whereas at the beginning of the century, our forebears clung to the prefix “biblio-”, thereby emphasizing that a pluridisciplinary analysis was being applied to documents, the abuse of suffixes ending in “STI” heralded a technocratic approach and a change of object. The result was not the building of a science but of (infra)structures, which dealt not with documents but with information 18 .” Moreover, the precise nature of STI which was to be the focus of the new field was never clearly defined although it seemed to be mostly limited to “documentary information”, i.e, units already extracted, analyzed and entered into databases which have acquired a certain degree of autonomy from their source (context of creation). Organizing documentary information became the raison d’être of IS, hence the field was seen first and foremost as serving the scientific community. The technological development of the field (databases, indexing and storage techniques) was not accompanied by a conceptual and epistemological study on the field’s objects, paradigms and methods. 2.1 The transition from manual bibliographic analysis to formal content analysis: 1950-1970 In order to fully account for the current state of IS in France today, it is necessary to look at the figures which made the transition from the pre-mechanized era in which Paul Otlet, Henri La Fontaine and Suzanne Briet's worked; and the era of mechanization (automation), which dates roughly from 1950 upwards. We owe this transition to a group of researchers mostly from the CNRS: mainly Jean-Claude Gardin, Eric de Grolier and Robert Pagès. Their works signaled a shift in focus, from the form or container (documents, books) to the contents (indexing and retrieval). The study of the former was relegated to library economics (bibliothéconomie) and to librarians, while the latter was the hobby-horse of the new batch of scientists with a more formal background. Robert Pagès and Jean-Claude Gardin were social scientists faced with knowledge organization problems in their own disciplines. Eric de Grolier was one of the transitional figures to hail from documentation. Pagès (1955) was critical of the logic underlying universal classification languages (Otlet's Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) and Dewey's Decimal Classification (DDC)), whereby objects are only seen from one dimension. He advocated an n-ary dimensional analysis of contents (documents). He saw “documentation” as a larger specialty subsuming library management because the latter was about books whereas the former was about documents, a category that subsumed books. Pagès wanted to study the relation between documents, books and experiences and called for the introduction of psychology into the study of documents. His idea was that documents are made of signs and symbols that are subject to interpretation. These symbols acquire meaning outside of their context of production. Thus a document is an instrument for accumulating symbolic activity. He studied other types of symbols like mathematical language and advocated the grounding of documentary classification languages on a formal scientific basis. This led him to create an analytic representation code for documents called “coded analysis” (analyse codée) or CODOC, which went into operation in 1954. The CODOC system was inspired by the functioning of natural language, symbolic logic and algebra. The idea was to design an extensible grammar and a lexicon that would enable the creation of new and unexpected classes, thus giving an infinite possibility for subdivision while being easy to memorize (mnemotechnical faculty). However, the result was an artificial language for indexing and classification that was inhospitable to memorization. Pagès worked on the normalization of specialized classification languages. Clearly, for Pagès, the focus was on analyzing and retrieving content, not organizing books. His idea of the nature of a document was not far removed from Briet’s own wide conception. Jean-Claude Gardin (1964) was a versatile scientist who majored in political economy, history of religions, linguistics, and archeology. He was confronted with the problem of sorting and comparing archeological objects referred to in scientific texts. Judging the analytic compilation of previous works to be an important component of scientific research, he sought ways to reduce their labor-intensive nature and to systematize the conceptual analysis of the contents of scientific communication. It was in this context that he designed SYNTOL (Syntagmatic Organization Language) in 1964, a sophisticated system for facet analysis, indexing, and IR. The CODOC and SYNTOL systems share some similar traits: they were designed by two CNRS researchers from the social sciences interested in scientific information representation and retrieval. Both systems sought to provide formal languages for content representation. They signaled a shift from bibliographical analysis to content analysis. They aimed to provide a better access to contents of scientific publication by enabling a multidimensional and combinatorial approach to IR. This paved the way for research on formalisms to automate content analysis. Gardin and Pagès's work also formed the basis for 18 In the original text: “Alors qu'au début du siècle nos acteurs s'accrochaient au préfixe bibliopour marquer que l'on appliquait une réflexion pluridisciplinaire au document, l'abus des "-ist" témoigne à la fois d'une démarche plus technocratique et d'un changement d'objet. On ne construit pas une science, mais des structures. Celles-ci ne traitent pas des documents, mais de l'information » Salaün (1993). 19 Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (The French National Center for Scientific Research which is the biggest research institution in the country). 20 Palermiti R. (2000) wrote a brief biography of these three transitional figures, which can be found at http://www.iut2.upmfgrenoble.fr/RI3/Mise_jour_06/TPS_precurseurs.htm. Published in The ASIST 75 Anniversary History Perspective. The history of ASIS&T and Information Science and Technology worldwide – October 27 Baltimore 2012, pp. 83-95. some of the research on automating information systems conducted in the early 1990s by French computer scientists and first-generation IS scholars who came from the sciences. 2.2. First generation scholars and research themes: 1974-1994 One way to track the evolution of research themes in a field is to examine the doctoral dissertations defended in the field. Polity (2000) surveyed the production of doctoral dissertations in IS in its first two decades of existence (1974 – 1994). Not surprisingly, IS was not very productive with an average of two dissertations defended per year. And also not surprisingly, the author encountered difficulties in identifying doctoral dissertations that fell under the IS branch. When searching the national database for thesis, Polity (2000) found that some dissertations that should have been indexed under IS were wrongly labeled as dealing with “Sciences, techniques and applied mathematics”. There was clearly a lack of institutional and social legitimacy as well as ignorance of the very existence of IS. In the first two decades, four universities were responsible for the majority of dissertations in IS. A team of researchers at the EHESS led by Jean Meyriat and Madeleine Wolff-Terroine produced the majority of the dissertations. Both figures were also prominent in the professional association of documentalists and information professionals (ADBS). The majority of the doctoral students were graduates from the INTD (National Institute for Documentation Techniques) which trained “engineers” in documentation. The Pierre Mendès France University in Grenoble produced the second largest number of PhD dissertations in this period, under the directorship of Jacques Rouault a computer scientist specialised in automated documentation and natural language processing (NLP). The focus of his research group (where the author of the current paper prepared her thesis) was on building a large coverage linguistic parser for the French language. The long term project of this research team was to ground automatic indexing and information retrieval (IR) tools on linguistic models. Hence, the focus was on formal language models and on information systems rather than on users or on theoretical aspects of IS. The University of Bordeaux 3 came third in terms of number of dissertations produced for this period. They were done under the directorship of two of the founding fathers of the discipline – Robert Escarpit and Robert Estivals. The latter specialised on “bibliologie”. The three Lyon universities came in the fourth position. Like the Grenoble group with whom they had a strong collaboration in the early eighties and nineties, the research focus in Lyon was also on NLP, IR and automatic documentation. Most of the dissertations were done under the supervision of Richard Bouché, a professor that also came from the sciences. The two campuses, Grenoble and Lyon had, for a period of time, co-accredited a doctoral program and helped trained a certain number of second generation scholars in IS who are currently professors in different French universities. In the fifth, sixth and seventh positions were the universities of Aix-Marseille, the University of Paris 8 (Vincennes – Saint Denis) and Toulouse respectively. The dissertations in Aix-Marseille were done under the supervision of Henri Dou, an IS professor specialised on bibliometrics. Those defended in the universities of Paris 8 and Toulouse were on more heterogeneous topics and were done under the supervision of professors in computer science working on IR applications. As was the case for graduate and post-graduate courses, students embarking on a doctorate dissertation in IS typically come from other disciplines, hence would be “beginners” in IS research with the result that “there could not really be a progression in the content of the different diplomas and no “accumulation of knowledge” (Palermiti & Polity, 2002). The consequence for the epistemological maturity of a field is that IS in France has not been able to produce the much needed researchers who by accumulation of knowledge, would have helped the discipline mature its concepts, theories and methodologies. 3. The dance between a narrow and wide conception of Information science This oscillation between the "hard" and the "soft" sciences is perceptible in the way scholars tried to define the discipline since its emergence in France. 3.1. At the beginning was a wide conception of Documentation and of Information science The period 1950-1980 was marked by the development of information processing worldwide, and in France by the design of the first series of automated tools for content analysis and representation (SYNTOL, CODOC). However, the conception 21 Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (The School of Higher Studies in Social Sciences). 22 Jean Meyriat died on the 26 of December 2010 at the age of 89. 23 The science of books. Published in The ASIST 75 Anniversary History Perspective. The history of ASIS&T and Information Science and Technology worldwide – October 27 Baltimore 2012, pp. 83-95. that Jean-Claude Gardin and Robert Pagès (who authored these systems) had of 'automatic documentation' was of a social science whose roots should be grounded in the humanities. Jean-Claude Gardin was particularly critical of the emerging fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) and skeptical of the claim made by scholars therein that there could be a universal semantic representation of discourse. He argued that such methods could only work in very restricted domains with a well circumscribed terminology. History has since proved him right. Robert Pagès was equally visionary in his defense of a 'science of documentation' that he called “documentology” which should be part of symbolic communications, grounded in the humanities and populated with “researchers-cumdocumentalists”. This, in his view, would ensure that documentation would not be reduced to a set of techniques aimed at solving practical problems or functional issues. We note however that the theoretical discourse and aspirations of Gardin and Pagès were somewhat at odds with their attempts to create a formal language for representing contents in scientific publications in order to facilitate their retrieval through a computer program. The formalization of language ultimately leads to stripping it of the rich nuances which make up human language and therefore to a narrow conception of the indexing (interpreting) and retrieval processes. The denomination "documentology" would be unsuccessfully taken up later by Jean Meyriat (1981a), one of the founding fathers of IS in France, in his attempts to find an adequate name for the discipline. 3.2 Midway came Artificial Intelligence, systems-driven paradigm and a narrow conception of