Arguments, debates, and dialogues: the GIS–social theory debate and the concern for alternatives

In recent years GIS practitioners have begun to argue for the importance of building a more flexible, open, and theoretical science of geographic information systems and geographic information – a geographic information science (Goodchild 1992, 1993, 1995; Openshaw 1991, 1992, 1996; Wright et al 1997). This theoretical turn has emerged as GIS itself has changed from an enterprise involving the development and testing of software and hardware, to the application of GIS and the study of data structures and visualisation techniques, to a field that has become so generalised in everyday life and in academic research that the specific role of any single discipline – especially one with a special relationship to GIS (geography) has to be rethought (Pickles 1997; Wright et al 1997). This chapter maps out the parallel evolution of responses to these phases of GIS development in geography, and geographers’ attempts to come to grips with the changing possibilities and problems that GIS has brought to the discipline and the wider society (see also Forer and Unwin, Chapter 54; Martin, Chapter 6). Specifically, the chapter seeks to locate the GIS social theory debate in geography (and their respective claims to method, science, and knowledge) in terms of a decade of changing technological and institutional ensembles, discourses, and practices which have brought about different responses and forms of engagement. We seek to capture something of the dynamism in the debate that occurred in the transition from the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s. This debate ranged from GIS as a research tool and scholarly practice (and the epistemological grounds on which these battles were fought), to debate about its fundamental assumptions and transformative capacities, to dialogue about alternative pathways for a technology that is increasingly realising both its utopian and dystopian possibilities. The chapter outlines briefly the nature of the opposition arguments that emerged as a result of the disciplinary impacts wrought by GIS in the 1980s. It then shows how these opposition arguments – while they still continued in some quarters – gradually began to take the form of a constructive debate about the real material and intellectual effects of GIS. We go on to show how this debate is currently leading to experiments in dialogue among individuals and groups with quite distinct goals and perhaps different conceptions of GIS as technology, practice, and body of ideas. A different understanding of the