Rob Kling and the Irvine School.

The Irvine School refers to an intellectual perspective on information technology in complex organizational settings that emerged at the University of California in Irvine, California (UCI), over the last three decades of the 20th century. In many ways, the rise of the Irvine School was synonymous with the rise of researcher Rob Kling's influence on the international community of scholars who would eventually form what Kling called social informatics. This article reflects on Kling's role in the creation of the Irvine School. Kenneth Kraemer, an architect and city planner by training, had joined the UCI Graduate School of Administration in 1967. He was one of the first scholars to begin careful empirical study of the effect of computerization in government agencies, and soon started a research program on information technology and local government at UCI's Public Policy Research Organization. In the early 1970s, researchers Jim Danziger and Rob Kling joined him in this endeavor. Danziger had been trained in political science and public administration. Kling had been trained in electrical engineering and computer science, and had done important work at the intersection of fuzzy logic and planning systems in the area of symbolic artificial intelligence.