Ilike very much the choice of question that Geoff Walsham brings to the fore in his opinion piece:‘Are we making a better world with ICTs?’(Walsham, 2012). It is a question that has been asked in other disciplines. Most powerful to me was the impassioned plea of Sumaantra Ghoshal (2005) who argued in his paper published posthumously that the management disciplines, by pushing agency theory, have had a negative impact on practice. He argued that management studies gave a cynical anti-ethical viewpoint to students and the large corporate frauds of the period reflected this.

Whether academics are that powerful is questionable. It is true that the proponents of the Chicago School have been influential. But academics probably reflected the mood of the time as much as formed that mood, exemplified and taken up by the neoliberal politics of Thatcher and Reagan and those following, expressed by the former as ‘there is no alternative.’Either way, whether causing or reflecting, management academics as a whole did not have a positive impact. Of course, there were dissenting voices, like Ghoshal, but the blinkered one-way view of the mainstream has managed to squash most dissenters. The information systems (IS) mainstream has also largely (but not entirely) pushed convention and merely reflected practice. The types of tools we ‘sell’in our courses have a role. This is seen all too frequently in our discussions of office systems, ERP systems and the rest. Implementing these systems tends on the whole to reflect a selfish, uncaring, business-for-profit view without too much regard to their ethical implications. On the whole, the IS discipline accepted de facto lean production, downsizing and cost cutting that were the inevitable consequences of some ICT. To give one example, we have not questioned ERP systems enough for causing loss in the quality of life for many people and merely talked about things like ERP’s component modules, their integration, how they relate to the supply chain, their implementation and their potential efficiency gains for the firm. But ERP can operationalize unacceptable management philosophy as they control how people work. Workers in call centers often have unacceptable stress levels as they try to meet targets. In France, there have recently been a number of suicides in manufacturing and in telecoms