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Category: Musings

Using a Process Philosophy Perspective in Information Systems Research: Principles of Creative Evolution

Using a Process Philosophy Perspective in Information Systems Research: Principles of Creative Evolution

Published January 16, 2025

In March 2024 David published a paper (online), co-authored with Frantz Rowe, entitled “Using a Process Philosophy Perspective in Information Systems Research: Principles of Creative Evolution” in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems – the foremost journal in our field. The paper was later published in Issue 5 of Volume 25 of the journal, in September 2024.

In March, David posted on LinkedIn, with a link to the paper, the following statement:

“Twenty-five years ago, as a PhD student, I bought a copy of Henri Bergson’s “Creative Evolution” in a second hand bookshop. What I grasped of his ideas became the philosophical bedrock of my thesis. Over the years that followed his works gradually came to be republished and I bought and read them with avid interest, and published two books on his philosophy, “Bergson, Complexity and Creative Emergence” in 2015, and “Against Nature” in 2018. During 2018, with a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, I engaged in a study of the consonances and dissonances between Bergson’s and Alfred North Whitehead’s ideas. I took a short paper about this to the International Conference on Information Systems in San Francisco in December 2018. There I met with Frantz Rowe, and we agreed to collaborate. We presented our first paper in this project fourteen months later at the Hawaii International Conference on Information Systems in January 2020, where we were encouraged to develop our ideas into a journal paper.

At the end of a long journey of multiple revisions, with the advice and guidance of a number of ‘critical friends’ (you know who you are), the enthusiastic but hard-task masters in our review team, and the patient and steady support of our Senior Editor, Dirk S. Hovorka, (to whom, and whose group, I presented the paper, in Sydney, in April 2023), I am proud and overjoyed to announce the culmination of a quarter of a century of work: the publication of “Using a Process Philosophy Perspective in Information Systems Research: Principles of Creative Evolution” by David Kreps and Frantz Rowe, in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems – the foremost journal in our field.”

Reference: Kreps, David and Rowe, Frantz (2024) “Research Perspectives: Using a Process Philosophy Perspective in Information Systems Research: Principles of Creative Evolution,” Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 25(5), 1410-1433.
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00883. Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol25/iss5/1

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#deleteFacebook

Published March 22, 2018

The sense of violation is almost palpable.  What we have suspected – what some of us have warned of – for many years, is now transparently true, and on the pages of newspapers around the world: Facebook has not just been using us, it has been abusing us.  As I said in 2011, we have surrendered ‘our personal data and the conduct of our friendships and (online) social ties to their marketplace’ and they have made their money off our backs.

The Cambridge Analytica scandal, broken by The Guardian following the extraordinary investigative journalism of Carole Cadwalladr, is opening up a can of worms for Mark Zuckerberg, who, after several days of complete silence, has finally, tersely, admitted that Facebook has been guilty of a ‘breach of trust’ – though it is clearly a ‘scandal of Facebook’s own making.’

Gathering momentum – though there is no way of telling yet how successful it will be – is a movement to #deleteFacebook.  With the aid of a Chrome browser extension, all the posts of the past years can be deleted from one’s account, (although the script takes a few hours to run).  Thus, although the profiling already achieved on the data already given to Facebook cannot be undone, that data can be withdrawn so that it can no longer be used, and one’s account no longer logged into, no longer used, eventually (after their 90day delay) completely deleted.  There are plenty of other means of sharing online – with our privacy intact.  Facebook has breached our trust, and does not deserve our data any more – if it ever did.

In a matter of a week or two, the four-week diary studies for this project will begin, and one question we will be asking our participants is simply this: “How do you feel about the way Facebook tricked you into feeling safe about giving up all your data to it? How do you feel about how they then used it underhandedly to make money out of you, and to allow others to use your data for electoral manipulation? How do you feel about how they have handled the fallout from these revelations? Have you deleted your Facebook posts, or your account?”

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Beginnings

Published January 8, 2018
Beginnings are always arbitrary.
They are always the effects of the slice of a sword through the flow, setting up a state that can be called ‘a beginning’.
Thus they constitute; ripples and after-shocks.
Thus they at best crest, at worst ignore, what precedes in the flow: the accumulated now.
This is the first post of my British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship blog.
Thus may it begin.
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