The heresy and the sport of information systems

Received: 8 August 2005 Revised: 22 September 2005 Accepted: 28 September 2005 Introduction Göteborg, Sweden, July 1999. I had just landed in the town that would have hosted me for my visiting period as Ph.D. student in Management Information Systems (from Luiss Guido Carli, Italy). The Viktoria Institute was going to be my location for 1 year. It was a light rainy day. For a weird coincidence of names (Övre Husargatan instead of Husargatan) I was waiting for my local landlord in the wrong street, under a harder and harder rain. After an hour, when I was already soaking wet (simple minded Italians assume that the sun shines everywhere in the world in July, so they put their umbrella and rain jacket in the most unreachable pocket of their huge luggagey), for the very first time I asked myself: ‘What am I doing here?’ The answer was quick and it suddenly cleared my doubts: Claudio Ciborra, a month before, told me that Viktoria Institute in Göteborg was ‘the place to go’ for developing my research. And without any hesitation I went through my most significant experience as a young scholar. I met Claudio in June of the same year at the ECIS Conference in Copenhagen. By reading his books and papers I had already felt that this guy had something ‘different’ in his mind. By chatting with him at the Doctoral Consortium I figured out what the ‘difference’ could have been made of.