Tecnologia de informação e mudança: uma abordagem crítica

This article critically analyzes the purely “tecnicist” and instrumental perspective that prevails in the information technology (IT) literature. The adaptive changes are differentiated from the paradigmatic changes, and the changes enabled by the IT are restricted to the efforts to improve the organization performance still within the dominant paradigm. Within the adaptive changes facilitated by IT, it is discussed how the distortions caused by the instrumental reasoning in the stakeholders’ perception of the nature of information, language, communication and cognitionseriously hurt the strategic management of information systems. Without neglecting the consequences of these distortions, it is defended that the IT myth brings consequences even worse, once this conception assumes that IT, by itself, can change the world. Presupposing that, to confront the myth, new epistemologies are necessary, aspects of the systemic view, critical theory and post-modernism are presented. To overcome the limits of the instrumental reasoning, the article suggests a paradigmatic and ideological change perspective, supported by a substantive reasonthat direct people’s actions towards the search of ecology equilibrium and the practice of social justice, situating the debate of the change process on an ethical perspective.