Visiting the red-light zones with Claudio

Received: 2 August 2005 Revised: 27 September 2005 Accepted: 28 September 2005 Introduction Shortly after Claudio’s permanent appointment at the LSE, he joined me in teaching the advanced MSc option ‘Interpretations of Information’. I had previously co-taught this course with Lucas Introna who had recently moved to Lancaster University. Both Lucas and Claudio shared a love of the work of Martin Heidegger so the structure and aims of the course remained relatively unchanged. Claudio, of course, also brought many innovations to the course, which he proudly described as both the most theoretical and the most practical that we taught at LSE. Even while he was ill, he was keen to know how the enrolments on the course were going and was always pleased with the excellent student evaluations the course received. Claudio always began the course with an intriguing lecture on the ‘krisis’ faced by the information systems field (Ciborra, 1997; Ciborra, 2002, chapter 2). The course, he argued, would provide the intellectual tools for dealing with the krisis; and after outlining the phenomenological method of putting aside our preconceptions he illustrated his approach by proposing to study some of the red-light zones of organizational life. For Claudio, these red-light zones were the places where much organizational innovation took place, at the boundaries of the conventionally accepted and traditionally regulated. The red-light zones were always there, he suggested, even if they were overlooked or ignored by many traditional management scholars; as such they were as much a constituent of organizational life as roles, hierarchies and structures. By starting our study here, he argued, we could advance our understanding of the information systems phenomena far more than by simply describing what ‘ought to be’. In this paper, I shall seek to develop this intriguing metaphor further by developing a clearer understanding of what is implied by the notion of redlight zones before illustrating the kinds of red-light zones that Claudio had studied in his own work and describing how I am trying to take Claudio’s challenge forward in my own work.