October 2001

Rob Kling grew up in Northern New Jersey. He completed his undergraduate studies at Columbia University (1965) and his graduate studies, specializing in Artificial Intelligence, at Stanford University (1967, 1971). Between 1966 and 1971 he held a research appointment in the Artificial Intelligence Center at the Stanford Research Institute. He held his first professorship in Computer Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison between 1970-1973. He was on the faculty of UC-Irvine from 1973-1996 and held professorial appointments at UCI's Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations and Graduate School of Management. 

In August 1996, he moved to Indiana University - Bloomington as Professor of Information Science and Information Systems. He directs a new interdisciplinary research center at IU, the Center for Social Informatics and also directs the Master of Information Science degree program. 

Since the early 1970s he has studied the social opportunities and dilemmas of computerization for managers, professionals, workers, and the public. Dr. Kling examines computerization as a social process with technical elements. He has studied how intensive computerization transforms work and how computerization entails many social choices. He has also studied the ways that complex information systems and expert systems are integrated into the social life of organizations. He has conducted studies in numerous kinds of organizations, including local governments, insurance companies, pharmaceutical firms, and hi-tech manufacturing firms. He has written about the value conflicts implicit in and social consequences of computerization which directly effects the public. He is currently studying the effective use of electronic media to support scholarly and professional communication. 

Dr. Kling is co-author of Computers and Politics: High Technology in American Local Governments (Columbia University Press, 1982) which examined how computerization reinforces the power of already powerful groups. He is co-editor of PostSuburban California: The Transformation of Postwar Orange County (University of California Press, 1990) examines the way that Orange County California is organized in a new social form beyond the traditional city and suburb, one that is spatially decentralized, functionally specialized, and mixes a rich array of residences, commerce, industry, services, government and the arts. PostSuburban California won the Thomas Athearn Award from the Western Historical Society in 1992 and was reissued in paperback in 1995. Computerization and Controversy: Value Conflicts & Social Choices(Academic Press, 1991) examines the social controversies about computerization in organizations and social life, regarding productivity, worklife, personal privacy, risks of computer systems, and computer ethics. (Dr. Kling is the sole editor of a substantially rewritten 2nd edition of Computerization and Controversy). 

In addition, his research has been published in over 85 journal articles and book chapters. He has presented numerous conference papers, given invited lectures at many major universities and the National Academy of Sciences, and given keynote and plenary talks at conferences in the United States, Canada and Western Europe. He has consulted for private firms, non-profit organizations, the Congress of the United States, and two foreign governments about the opportunities and problems of computerization. In the late 1990's, he served on the Executive Committee of the US ACM Committee for Computers and Public Policy, the American Sociological Association's Committee on Electronic publishing, and the AAAS's National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists.  

Dr. Kling has been co-director of UCI's doctoral concentration on Computing, Organizations, Policy and Society. He is Editor- in-Chief of The Information Society and serves on the editorial and advisory boards of several other scholarly and professional journals including, European Journal of CSCW, Information Technology and People, Social Science Computer Review, and Accounting, Management and Information Technology. He has also organized special workshops about the social and managerial aspects of computerization, served on the program committees of several major national conferences, and was Chair of an (IFIP) international working group on the Social Accountability of Computing. 

Dr. Kling has been a visiting Professor at the Copenhagen School of Business and Economics and at the Solvay School of Business at the University of Brussels. He has also been a Research Fellow at Harvard University's Program on Information Resources Policy and a Visiting Researcher at the Gessellschaft fur Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung in Bonn, Germany. 

Dr. Kling's scholarly and professional accomplishments have been recognized nationally and internationally. In 2001, he was elected to be a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 1987, he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Social Sciences by the Free University of Brussels. In 1983, he received a Silver Core Award from the International Federation of Information Processing Societies. In 1984, he received a Service Award from the Association for Computing Machinery.