Rob Kling and the Irvine School

The Irvine School refers to an intellectual perspective on information technology in complex organizational settings that emerged at the University of California, Irvine, over the last three decades of the 20th century. In many ways, the rise of the Irvine School was synonymous with the rise of Rob Kling’s influence on the international community of scholars who would eventually form what Rob called social informatics. This essay reflects on Rob’s role in the creation of the Irvine School, and the ways in which the rise of the Irvine School shaped Rob’s thinking. The Irvine School began as an unusual confluence of talent at the new Irvine campus of the University of California in the early 1970s.1 UCI was a new university, having opened its doors in 1965. Kenneth Kraemer, an architect and city planner by training, had joined the UCI Graduate School of Administration in 1967. He was one of the first scholars to begin careful empirical study of the effect of computerization in government agencies, and soon started a research program on IT and local government at UCI’s Public Policy Research Organization (PPRO).2 In the early 1970s Jim Danziger and Rob Kling joined him in this endeavor. Jim had been trained in political science and public administration, and had done research on local government financial practices. This perspective fit well with Ken’s emerging program of study, given that finance was then the primary application for information technology. Rob had been trained in electrical engineering and computer science, and had done important work at the intersection of fuzzy logic and planning systems in the area of symbolic artificial intelligence. This was an unlikely match for a study of IT use in local government, but Rob was a rather unusual computer scientist. As early as 1967, while a graduate student at Stanford, Rob had begun writing about social aspects of computer technology. During 2 years on the computer science