Sign Information and Norm

SI G NS, IN F O R M A T I O N, N O R MS A ND SYST E MS

Ronald Stamper School of Management Studies University of Twente POBox 217, 7500 AE Enschede The Netherlands Tel: [phone] Fax: [phone] email: [e-mail]

In The Semiotics of the Workplace, edited by B. Holmqvist and P.B. Andersen in 1995,

(c) 1994 Ronald Keith Stamper. All rights reserved.

Signs, Information, Norms and Systems Ronald Stamper The motivation behind the work reported here has been practical since its inception and today, the results are actually proving successful in practice. The story began in an experience that I must surely share with many of my colleagues. I worked in public administration and then in industry where I experienced computers being used with great technical skill but with only poor results for the client organisation. There seemed to be one overwhelming reason for this technical efficiency combined with organisational ineffectiveness: we knew all about information technology but precious little about the information it carried. We could produce bottles but we did not understand the wine. Information is the wine. Information is a vague and elusive concept, whereas the technological concepts are relatively easy to grasp. Semiotics solves this problem by using the concept of a sign as a starting point for a rigorous treatment for some rather woolly notions surrounding the concept of information. A sign is a good concrete primitive. Semiotics only provides the sign as a primitive concept and a broad framework for exploring its properties and uses. What we discover is that many different meanings of `information ' and other key concepts such as `communication ', `meaning ', `relevance ' and so on, can be understood in many precise ways as a number of distinct properties of signs or of operations performed with signs. The theory of signs (semiotics or semiology) can transform our understanding of information systems (perhaps we should call them

References: Andersen, P. Bogh (1990), A Theory of Computer Semiotics. Semiotic Approaches to Construction and Assessment of Computer Systems, Cambridge University Press Gibson James J., (1968), The senses considered as perceptual systems, Allen & Unwin, London. Gibson, James, J, (1979), The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company. Holt, A, H.R. Ramsey & J.D. Grimes, (1983) "Coordination system technology as the basis for a programming environment" Electrical Communications vol 57, pp. 307-314. Kitcher, Philip (1984), The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge, Oxford University Press. Lehtinen, E. and K. Lyytinen (1986), "An action based model of information systems" Information Systems, vol 13 no 4 pp. 299-318 Liu, Kecheng, Yasser Ades, Ronald Stamper (1994), "Simplicity, Uniformity and Quality the role of Semantic Analysis in systems development", Software Quality Management Conference, S QM '94, Edinburgh, UK Locke, John, 1690/1959 , Essay Concerning Human Understanding, unabridged edtion 1959, Dover, New York. Michaels, C.F. and C.Carello, (1981), Direct Perception, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall. Nauta, Doede, (1972), The Meaning of Information, Mouton, The Hague. Olle, T.W., H.G. Sol, and A. Verrijn-Stuart (1982), Information Systems Design Methodologies: a Comparative Review, North Holland, Amsterdam Pierce C. S., (l93l-35), Collected Papers, (6 volumes), Hartshorne C. & P. Weiss (eds.), Cambridge, Mass. Harvard U.P. Russell, Bertrand (1956), "The philosophy of logical atomism" in his Logic and Knowledge, R.C. Marsh (ed), London 1956. de Saussure, Ferdinand (1949) Cours de Linguistique Général, Paris Stamper, R. (1973) Information in Business and Administrative Systems, Batsford, London & Wiley, New York. (2nd edition to be published by Basil Blackwell, Oxford) Wittgenstein, Ludwig, (1953), Philosophical Investigations, Trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford, Basil Blackwell. 32