Bricolage, Care and Information

Claudio Ciborra was one of the most innovative thinkers in the field of information systems. He was one of the first scholars who introduced institutional economics in the study of IS; he elaborated new concepts, such as 'the platform organization', 'formative contexts'; and he contributed to the development of a new perspective altogether through Heideggerian phenomenology. This book contains the most seminal work of Claudio Ciborra and work of other authors who were inspired by this work and built on it. It is composed by three parts: The first part is an introduction, written by Giovan Francesco Lanzara, that takes the reader through the unfolding of Ciborra's thought and elaborates on the main themes of his work, namely socio-technical systems, institutional economics of information systems, IT and organizational learning, and finally his phenomenological analyses of information systems. The second part contains 11 of Claudio Ciborra's publications, selected by the editors to convey best the development of his work; it includes articles on all the thematic categories identified at the introduction, though the largest category is on his phenomenological work, which was his most significant contribution. The third part contains 9 articles by other authors (2 of them co-authored by Ciborra) whose research was founded on Ciborra's ideas.