Interview with John Leslie King
John Leslie King is Vice Provost for Academic Information and Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. For more information, visit Dr. King’s home page at http://www.si.umich.edu/~jlking/.
The following email interview was completed on April 24, 2007…
When did you meet Dr. Kling and in what capacity did you know him? Could you please share some specific anecdotes?
I met Rob for the first time in the summer of 1972 when he joined the Urban Information Systems Research Project (URBIS) at what was then known as the Public Policy Research Organization (PPRO, now the Center for Research on Information Technology and Organizations, CRITO) at the University of California, Irvine. Rob had just joined UCI’s Department of Information and Computer Science as an Assistant Professor. I was at that time a MS student in the UCI Graduate School of Administration (GSA), working as a research assistant with Kenneth Kraemer at PPRO on a project called EPRIS, for Evaluation of Policy Research on Information Systems. EPRIS was funded by the National Science Foundation, and arose from PPRO’s first successful grant application to the NSF for study of computerization in organizations. The EPRIS project laid the groundwork for the much larger URBIS Project, which became (and still is) one of the largest systematic and empirical studies of computer use in organizations ever done.
Rob joined the URBIS team, which consisted at the time of Ken Kraemer, Jim Danziger, Bill Dutton, Alex Mood, and several graduate students, including me. Ken had been trained in architecture and public administration and was a tenured Associate Professor on the GSA faculty. Jim was a political scientist who’d studied local government budgeting practices, and was an Assistant Professor in the School of Social Sciences. Bill, a research scientist for PPRO, had received his PhD in Political Science shortly before from SUNY Buffalo, and was an expert in survey research. Alex was the former Director of PPRO, and an adjunct member of the GSA faculty, who was famous as one of the founders of statistical theory and had led the mathematics group at the RAND Corporation during a key period in the Cold War. Rob was the only true technologist among the group. His undergraduate degree was in electrical engineering and his PhD in computer science. He had specialized in the newly emerging field of artificial intelligence, working at Stanford University and Stanford Research Institute under Edward Feigenbaum, who became famous for his work in expert systems. Rob’s work was in the intersection of planning systems and fuzzy logic, and his dissertation was a pioneering piece that was cited for decades after.
Rob contributed much to the URBIS Project. In particular, he was interested in the effect of computerization on the work life of ordinary people, especially white-collar and so-called “pink collar” workers (clerks, etc.). He made sure the project concentrated on those issues. He was concerned that computerization might lower the quality of work life for such people, but he was very open-minded and agnostic about whether such effects were actually occurring. In this as in other areas of Rob’s research, he preferred empirical data to opinion, and while he was ready to find that computerization had reduced quality of work life, he was equally pleased when the extensive data from the research project showed otherwise. This is part of what was rewarding working with Rob. He was a true scholar and researcher, not an ideologue bent on proving his points. I was a doctoral student through much of the URBIS Project (I joined the faculty later), and I learned a great deal from working with Rob.
I understand that you were part of the CORPS (Computers, Organizations, Policy and Society) faculty with Dr. Kling at the University of California, Irvine. Can you describe how this group came about and its contributions?
I was hired onto the faculty of Information and Computer Science at UCI in 1980 by the then chair of the program, Julian Feldman. Julian was one of the early artificial intelligence researchers, a student of Herbert Simon. He had recruited Rob to UCI. Julian, Rob and I formed a kind of rump group within ICS that was known simply as “Area 5.” It consisted of the small but growing software group and what we vaguely called “applications.” Rob wanted to create a concentrated focus on social aspects of computing, and Julian was amenable. My own interests were more along managerial lines, so I proposed Social and Managerial Analysis of Computing – SMAC. Rob wasn’t quite ready for that acronym. We went back and forth and finally settled on CORPS. It fit the bill, readily containing the interests of both Rob and me. Mark Ackerman soon thereafter joined us from MIT, and then Jonathan Grudin joined the group. CORPS began to weaken as an organizational entity when Rob left for Indiana in 1996; in relatively short order, Jonathan left for Microsoft Research, I left for Michigan, and Mark left for MIT (and eventually Michigan). CORPS was pretty much finished by 2001, but by that time we had established a strong partnership with the Software group (history coming full circle!) and CORPS and Software became the nexus of the Informatics Department within ICS at UCI.
I know that your collaboration with Dr. Kling continued beyond Irvine. What was it like being a colleague of Dr. Kling’s - specifically as it relates to his evolving ideas about Social Informatics?
Rob had started arguing at UCI that we ought to create something called “Informatics.” He liked the emerging use of the term by certain professional worlds, notably the medical and legal. Not many people in ICS liked the term at that time, and they were particularly reluctant to adopt the notion of “social informatics” that Rob was pushing. Ironically, the name Informatics was adopted by the department that grew out of CORPS and Software, but that was later. My understanding from Rob was that a major part of his attraction to Indiana was the willingness of the university to allow him to create a center focused on Social Informatics – something he felt he couldn’t accomplish at UCI. Rob and I had worked together for 25 years by that point, so we knew each other very well. We never exactly collaborated on the formation of Social Informatics as a field – this was Rob’s crusade more than mine. But so many of our ideas were in synch with each other that we were working toward the same substantive ends. And I wasn’t particularly attached to the signifiers – Social Informatics was fine with me. I was happy to see Rob build it up, and to help around the edges. After I moved to Michigan, Rob kept trying to get me to his center to give a talk. I’d agreed that I would do it, but unfortunately, his untimely death came before I could.
How has working with Dr. Kling impacted your research agenda? What were the most valuable things you learned from him - and vice versa?
Rob was a hard-core scholar and researcher. He lived the life. He was a very interesting character with broad interests, but his work was a very central life interest for him. You learned pretty quickly that hanging around Rob meant discussing research. It was a great privilege working with Rob and the other people that formed our group at UCI when I was a graduate student. I did not realize it then, but that experience made me realize and accept the fact that the life of a scholar and researcher is one of constant dedication, constant work. Later, when people would ask me how I had managed to be productive in my research, I simply said that was the culture I learned in our group at UCI. You worked and produced, and you loved doing it. Another thing Rob taught me was the need to understand the theory behind things. He was a good theoretician, but perhaps most valuable, he was not a doctrinaire theoretician. He wasn’t deluded by the idea that theory was somehow more important, more pure, more honorable than other forms of inquiry. He saw theory as practical: if you could find and apply theory, you saved a lot of time in your work. I adopted this view, and it has been a core part of my own work since. I guess the other thing I learned from Rob was that research is a lot easier if it’s fun. We had a lot of fun doing research. I don’t think we would have done it if it wasn’t fun.
As indicated on your web page at http://www.si.umich.edu/~jlking/, you were Dean of the School of Information at the University of Michigan. How prominent are Social Informatics concepts within that program?
Rob’s work is on the “must read” lists at SI at Michigan. It was that way when I arrived in 2000. SI never really adopted the “informatics” signifier for its core programs, but much of what we do is aligned very closely with Social Informatics. People in SI certainly see themselves as part of the movement that the Social Informatics world espouses. Interestingly, SI recently put together an interdisciplinary undergraduate major with computer science and statistics, and it is called Informatics. Within that major is a sub-area called Social Information. I think you can see the connection.
How best do you think information schools can best incorporate Social Informatics into their programs - if at all?
I don’t think it’s about the name; there are lots of different ways to describe Social Informatics. Rather, it’s a point-of-view and set of beliefs and aspirations. Any program that incorporates what have long been called “socio-technical” views of the world is at least a borderline Social Informatics program, and any that specifically focus on social action as central to technology is squarely in the Social Informatics camp.
I note that one of your recent publications is on “automotive informatics.” The term “informatics” seems to be used quite frequently and has been the source of much debate. Can you shed any light on the matter?
It was a matter of convenience that we picked that title. Truthfully, it was the meter of the signifier – two four-syllable words that created a nice cadence, and happened to capture exactly what we had in mind. As I mentioned earlier, the “informatics” signifier was already being used in medicine and law by the time we started discussing it at UCI. It was a noun to which it was easy to attach specific adjectives. As Rob was fond of pointing out, well before this was commonplace knowledge, that computing was going into everything. It would have been easy to simply use the signifier “computing” – medical computing, legal computing, social computing, etc. But computing had been colonized by a fairly narrow view of the world, at least in Rob’s mind – a world dominated by questions of Turing computability and other formal abstractions. I think Rob simply did not feel it was possible to pry the signifier “computing” away from that tradition, and “informatics” was constructively ambiguous, especially in North America where the term had not been used much prior to the 1990s.
What opportunities and challenges do you feel exist for individuals trained in Social Informatics? Are there some specific research questions or hot topics where Social Informatics perspectives would be most useful?
Well, if IT is in everything (and it is), that includes the social realm. Moreover, we see how all technical realms are, themselves, shaped by social action — the social constructionist view of technology. There should be plenty of opportunities for people learning from Social Informatics perspectives, but it’s best to be realistic about how opportunities work. People who want to do research and education from a social informatics perspective are constrained by the general constraints of the research and education worlds – industrial research and higher education. It’s hard to imagine being employed as a “social informatics specialist” outside those realms. But that doesn’t mean that social informatics perspectives are irrelevant to other worlds of work. One of the things that Rob and I did come to agree on in the late 1990’s when we were at UCI was the need for people from the social informatics perspective to “cross over” to the side of system design and development, especially in the challenging area of requirements analysis. Many system development failures can be traced to failure to comprehend actual requirements, and much of that is due to inability to understand the social dimensions of technical change. I think social informatics perspectives are vital for anyone who wants to work in the IT field or in fields that are highly dependent on IT.
What words of wisdom would you like to pass on to others involved in Social Informatics teaching or research?
The most important thing is this: in opening up any new field of work, those there at the beginning have to work harder and be better if they really want to succeed. Rob was often very frustrated that the people he wanted most to affect – computer scientists and computer professionals – failed to understand what he was talking about, and were sometimes actively hostile toward what he was saying. I remember talking with Rob’s Ph.D. advisor, Ed Feigenbaum, in the early 1980’s, when Feigenbaum said Rob had been one of his most promising PhD students until Rob “threw his career away” working on social issues of computing. This was said somewhat in jest, but not entirely: many of those Rob was trying to win over simply were not interested in what he was saying. Some resented him for even bringing up the issues. Rob persevered, and because he was such a strong intellect and he was willing to work so hard, Rob prevailed in driving down the roots of Social Informatics. It’s easy in retrospect to think that Social Informatics was a no-brainer, that it was something that was going to emerge sooner or later. This misunderstands the realm of ideas. Social informatics happened because Rob and others were willing to work harder and be better, and to keep going until they won. The field is still like that. It’s not for the faint of heart.
Where would you like to see the field of Social Informatics go? Are there specific opportunities that should be seized or threats to be dealt with?
I still think that the biggest direct contribution of Social Informatics will be to improve human welfare in the form of improved information technologies and systems. That does not mean there is no role for simply understanding more about how computerization affects the world; of course, there is a major role for such work. But it doesn’t make much sense to me to comment on how things are without trying to make them better. I believe people with strong Social Informatics skills should be part of every system design and development project. Beyond that, I don’t think much about whether Social Informatics as a “field” prospers. Fields of work come and go, and as often as not, there is a high price paid for moving from a focus on the interesting new problems in the world to the more mundane and wasteful squabbles about the identity, legitimacy and power of emerging academic field. The special opportunities for Social Informatics are not those that emerge from the growing world of IT application. They arise from people with skills in understanding Social Informatics making contributions to the larger social understanding of such issues.
Is there anything else you would like to share about Dr. Kling, Social Informatics, or your own research and ideas?
I think I’ve covered most of what’s relevant. I consider it a real privilege to have worked with Rob for as long as I did, and I am grateful for the opportunity to learn as much as I did from him. I really miss him.
