Cybernetics, Management Science, and Technology Policy: The Emergence of "Information Technology" as a Keyword, 1948-1985

Kline analyzes how a knowledge-based meaning of information technology was transformed into artifactual understanding. He identifies proponents of management science, a new professional group in the America of the 1960s, as selecting information technology as their keyword. He also describes how information became a keyword in the physical and social sciences, and treats the diverse meanings as a resource for studying how and why a variety of communities helped to create and express the apparently new phenomena signified by information and information technology, as well as how and why they used techno-revolutionary language to promote new disciplines and technologies.