Lucas Introna

Lucas D. Introna (born 1961) is Professor of Organisation, Technology and Ethics at the Lancaster University Management School. He is a scholar within the Social Study of Information Systems field. His research is focused on the phenomenon of technology. Within the area of technology studies he has made significant contributions to our understanding of the ethical and political implications of technology for society.

Early on in his career Introna was concerned with the way managers incorporated information in support of managerial practices (such as planning, decision-making, etc.). In this work he provided an account of the manager as an always already involved and entangled actor (which is always to a greater or lesser extent already compromised and configured) in contrast to the traditional normative model of the manager as a rational objective free agent that can choose to act or not act in particular ways. Later on his work shifted to a more critical appraisal of technology itself. He, together with co-workers, published a number of critical evaluations of information technology including search engines, ATMs, facial recognition systems, etc. His recent work focuses on the ethical and political aspects of technology as well as making contribution to a field that has become known as sociomateriality.

In his book Management, Information and Power, Introna argued that most management education is normatively based (i.e. telling managers how they ought to act), yet managers' organisational reality is mostly based on the ongoing play of power and politics, as has been shown by Henry Mintzberg (See also his recent book Managing). Thus, instead of using information to inform rationality (as the traditional normative models assume) information is rather most often deployed as a resource in organisational politics. This fact, Introna argues, requires an understanding of the relationship between information and power (as suggested in the work of Michel Foucault) rather than information and rationality, as traditionally assumed in the mainstream management literature.

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