Facts, myths and thought-styles… and a rallying cry for civic engagement

This polemic concludes with two programmatic recommendations for the Information Systems (IS) field. First, a call for more research in the public services, and for greater civic engagement generally; second, that we shake off our enchantment with Theory, not least in the interests of dissemination and communication, especially with non-academic audiences. Our critique of theory uses Barthes’ structuralism to argue that theories are myths which order, interpret and normalise the world. Leading into this, we address the fundamental question “what is a fact”, drawing on the epistemology of Ludwik Fleck (his concepts of thought-style and thought-collective in particular) which we believe deserves more recognition in IS. The empirical material for our analyses comes from two case studies, both from the domain of child protection in the UK. The paper is introduced with a brief exposition of the myth that information systems are fact-repositories. We stress that, though based on domestic examples, our messages are universal and strategic for the field. To set the scene, the paper opens with some lines from Aeschylus, describing a mythical event at the outset of Agamemnon’s ill-fated Trojan campaign.