Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs) can experience difficulties in adopting Information Systems (IS) and aligning them with their strategic development. Using the concept of bricolage, an improvisational approach that allows learning from concrete experience, we explore IS adoption and organisational change in two SME case studies. The case studies cover IS rationalisations and innovation...

According to constructivism, learning takes place by constructing cognitive structures. An experiment was carried out to uncover the mental models of experienced, but not professional, users of a word processor. The study shows that the mental models are superficial, and that bricolage (trial-and-error) is extensively used even though it is not viable for solving nontrivial problems. The conclu...

The paper discusses the role of extemporaneous action and bricolage in designing and implementing information systems in organizations. We report a longitudinal field study of design and implementation of a Web-based groupware application in a multinational corporation. We adopt a sensemaking perspective to analyze the dynamics of this process and show that improvisational action and bricolage ...

Claudio Ciborra died from cancer on the 13th February in Milan. Claudio was an original and brilliant IS researcher. He had a huge impact on the international IS community, in particular through concepts he made familiar to us like bricolage, improvisation, drifting, care, hospitality, etc. His latest book, The Labyrinths of Information, is a brilliant exposé of these concepts. Claudio was a ve...

Teachers usually implement their pedagogical ideas in Virtual Learning Environments (VLEs) in a continuous refinement approach also known as “bricolage”. Recently, different proposals have enabled the ubiquitous access to VLEs, thus extending the bricolage mode of operation to other learning spaces. However, such proposals tend to present several limitations for teachers to orchestrate learning...

This paper describes and analyses the history of the fundamental equation of modern financial economics: the Black-Scholes (or Black-Scholes-Merton) option pricing equation. In that history, several themes of potentially general importance are revealed. First, the key mathematical work was not rule-following but bricolage, creative tinkering. Second, it was, however, bricolage guided by the goa...