Contributions, topics, and methods

T he previous special issue of JIT (March 2013) comprised a set of papers on the history of IS, together with an extensive introductory essay by the editors (Bryant et al., 2013). The response to our Call for Papers on this topic was very encouraging, eliciting more than 20 completed papers, from which 10 were selected for publication across two issues. The range of papers was such that, rather than dividing them in terms of content or topic, the five published in the March issue were those that were first to complete the cycle of review and revision. In this issue, we publish the remaining five. The five presented in this issue cover a variety of topics, including two more papers that look at the development of the internet: Clarke taking a specifically Australian perspective, describing some of the earliest adopters in that region; Epstein offering an account of the ways in which the governance of the internet came to the centre of worldwide attention with the UN gatherings of World Summit on the Information Society I and II, and their aftermath. Between them, these papers illustrate the complex series of events that led to the current and still changing situation. This institutional perspective is also taken up in Elbanna and Newman’s paper on the work of Enid Mumford, particularly the rise and demise of the ETHICS approach or method. They use Latour’s Five Loop model as an explanatory framework, and Latour’s work also forms a key resource for Bonner’s analysis of the history of the Canadian personal motor vehicle registration (MVR) system in the form of Actor-Network Theory (ANT). Finally, Akhlaghpour and colleagues offer an account of the ways in which Orlikowski and Iacono’s call for a focus on the ‘IT Artifact’ (or Artefact) has or has not been taken up in the main body of the US and European IS journals. Overall, the 10 contributions cover a range of different topics, but some cover similar ground although from different perspectives. Thus, several deal with the internet as a central feature of their analyses but this is hardly surprising, given the ways in which the internet has developed since the 1960s, and particularly over the past 20–30 years. Akhlaghpour and colleagues discuss the ways in which the academic IS community has or has not taken up the quest for the IT Artifact, but there is surely a room for some irony in a widespread failure to recognize that perhaps the internet is the IT (or ICT) artefact par excellence, in which case the quest is already underway, and the metaphor can be extended to see the internet as a keystone of IS for academics, researchers, and practitioners. On the other hand, it has also become a key feature of many other disciplinary areas, and thus the challenge for IS researchers and academics generally is to stake a claim for conceptualizing specific issues around this technology, although as we stated in our earlier essay we are not advocating the idea of articulating some clear, central core for IS itself. Orlikowski and Iacono (2001) argued that IT was something of a spectre at the feast, but this is hardly the case with the internet since it appears to be constantly the centre of attention, either in its generic form or in terms of specific instantiations such as social networking, mobile technologies and applications, and the like. No doubt, in time the internet will fade into the background, and future generations may well assume that the origins of the internet lie in one of the initial acts of creation, in which case historians of the future will need to offer accounts that bring the nature of these developments back into consideration. In a similar manner, the 10 papers in these two issues are largely motivated by a need to explain that specific aspects of what happened in the past need to be reinterpreted and taken into account for our current understanding of issues around IS. In this regard, Gannon’s paper throws light on the early days of IT systems, recording people’s recollections dating back to the 1960s, offering an ‘insider’ view of how those early pioneers were viewed as ‘outsiders’ in a corporate world that now seems worlds apart from the organization of the early 21st century. This raises the question of the extent to which IS people are still regarded as outsiders, and if so what the consequences might be of their outsider status. In our introductory essay in the previous issue, we made the point that one feature of historical analysis should be to explore the extent to which the familiar might appear strange, and the strange appear familiar. Gannon’s paper does this by contrasting the early days of organizational computing with those experienced in more recent times. Heinrich and Riedl, on the other hand, focus on the development of something akin to IS, but from a perspective markedly different from the more common USor UK-based contexts. In their account of what they term the Business Journal of Information Technology (2013) 28, 91–92 & 2013 JIT Palgrave Macmillan All rights reserved 0268-3962/13