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EXPERIENCING 4e
KROENKE + WILSON + BROOKES

MS
Copyright © Pearson Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) 2016—9781486019281—Kroenke/Experiencing MIS 4e
CONTENTS vii
CHAPTER 3
ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY, PART 2
INFORMATION SYSTEMS AND
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE 42
Information Technology 68
THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU 68
STUDY QUESTIONS 43
Q1 How Does Organisational Strategy Determine

CHAPTER 4
Information Systems Requirements? 43
HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE 70
Q2 What Five Forces Determine Industry Structure? 44
Q3 What Is Competitive Strategy? 45 STUDY QUESTIONS 71
Q4 How Does Competitive Strategy Determine
Q1 What Do Business Professionals Need to Know
Value Chain Structure? 46 about Computer Hardware? 71
Primary Activities in the Value Chain 46 Basic Components 71
Support Activities in the Value Chain 47 Computer Data 73
Value Chain Linkages 47 How a Computer Works, in Fewer than
300 Words? 74
ETHICS GUIDE Yikes! Bikes 48 Why Should a Manager Care How a
Q5 How Do Value Chains Determine Business Computer Works? 75
Processes and Information Systems? 50 What is the Difference Between a Client
and a Server? 76
EXPERIENCING MIS INCLASS 3 Q2 What Do Business Professionals Need to Know
Competitive Strategy over the Web 51 about Operating Systems Software? 77
Q6 How Do Information Systems Provide EXPERIENCING MIS INCLASS 4
Competitive Advantage? 51 Innovation in Practice: Microsoft Surface 78
Competitive Advantage via Products 52 GREEN IT GUIDE NAB Data Centres 80
Competitive Advantage via Business Processes 53 What Are the Major Operating Systems? 82
Non-Mobile Client Operating Systems 82
How Does an Actual Company Use IS to
Mobile Client Operating Systems 83
Create Competitive Advantage? 53
Server Operating Systems 83
How Does This System Create a Competitive
Virtualisation 84
Advantage? 55
Owning versus Licensing 85
GUIDE Your Personal Competitive Advantage 56 Q3 What Do Business Professionals Need to Know
HOW DOES THE KNOWLEDGE IN THIS CHAPTER about Applications Software? 85
HELP KERRIE AND YOU? 58 What Categories of Application
Programs Exist? 86
Active Review 59
Thin Clients Versus Thick Clients 86
Key Terms and Concepts 59 How Do Organisations Acquire
Using Your Knowledge 59 Application Software? 88
Collaboration Exercise 3 60 Thin-client Versus Thick-client Mobile
Custom Software 89
CASE STUDY 3 Competitive Advantage at
What is Firmware? 89
National Australia Bank 62
Q4 Is Open-source Software a Viable
PART 1 REVIEW 63 Alternative? 89
GUIDE Keeping up to Speed 90
Consider Your Net Worth 63
Why Do Programmers Volunteer
Application Exercises 63 Their Services? 92
PART 1 CASE STUDY Innovation in How Does Open Source Work? 92
Information Systems 65 So, Is Open Source Viable? 93
viii CONTENTS
HOW DOES THE KNOWLEDGE IN THIS Q2 How Do Organisations Use the Cloud? 130
CHAPTER HELP KERRIE AND YOU? 93
Cloud Services From Cloud Vendors 130
Active Review 95 Content Delivery Networks From
Key Terms and Concepts 95 Cloud Vendors 130
Using Your Knowledge 96 Use Web Services Internally 131
Collaboration Exercise 4 96 EXPERIENCING MIS INCLASS 6
CASE STUDY 4 Dell Leverages the Internet, What, Exactly, Does that Standard Mean? 132
Directly, but for How Long? 97
Q3 How Can Organisations Use Cloud
Services Securely? 133
CHAPTER 5 Virtual Private Network (VPN) 133
DATABASE PROCESSING 99 GUIDE You Said What? About Me? In Class? 134
THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU 99 Using a Private Cloud 136
STUDY QUESTIONS 100 Using a Virtual Private Cloud 138
Q4 How Can $RU Use the Cloud? 139
Q1 What Is the Purpose of a Database? 100
SaaS Services at $RU 139
Q2 What Is a Database? 101 PaaS Services at $RU 139
Relationships Between Rows? 103 IaaS Services at $RU 139
Q3 What Is a Database Management System? 105 GREEN IT GUIDE Energy Use of
EXPERIENCING MIS INCLASS 5 Electronic Devices 140
How Much Is a Database Worth? 106 Q5 What Does the Cloud Mean for Your Future? 142
Q4 How Do Database Applications Make HOW DOES THE KNOWLEDGE IN THIS
Databases More Useful? 108 CHAPTER HELP KERRIE AND YOU? 143
Traditional Forms, Queries, Reports and Active Review 144
Applications 109
Key Terms and Concepts 145
Thin-Client Forms, Queries, Reports and
Using Your Knowledge 145
Applications 111
Collaboration Exercise 6 145
GUIDE No Thanks, I’ll Use a Spreadsheet 112
CASE STUDY 6 Political Clouds 146
ETHICS GUIDE Nobody Said I Shouldn’t 114
Multi-User Processing 117 PART 2 REVIEW 148
HOW DOES THE KNOWLEDGE IN THIS CHAPTER Consider Your Net Worth 148
HELP KERRIE AND YOU? 118 Application Exercises 148
Active Review 118 PART 2 CASE STUDY Better Buying
Key Terms and Concepts 119 for Business: The eBreviate Story 153
CASE STUDY 5 Is Australia’s Electronic Health PART 3
Record the Cure We’ve Been Waiting for? 122
Using IS for Competitive
CHAPTER 6 Advantage 156
THE CLOUD 124
STUDY QUESTIONS 125 CHAPTER 7
Q1 Why Is the Cloud the Future for
ORGANISATIONS AND INFORMATION
Most Organisations? 125 SYSTEMS 158
What Is the Cloud? 125 THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU 158
Why Is the Cloud Preferred to STUDY QUESTIONS 159
In-House Hosting? 128
Why Now? 129 Q1 How Do Information Systems Vary by Scope? 159
When Does the Cloud Not Make Sense? 129 Personal Information Systems 159
CONTENTS ix
Workgroup Information Systems 160 Social Media and the Sales and
Enterprise Information Systems 160 Marketing Activity 191
Inter-Enterprise Information Social Media and Customer Service 192
Systems 160 Social Media and Inbound and
Q2 How Do Enterprise Systems Solve Outbound Logistics 193
the Problems of Departmental Silos? 161 Social Media and Manufacturing
and Operations 193
How Do Information Silos Arise? 161
Social Media and Human Resources 194
What Are the Problems with
Information Silos? 161 Q3 How Do SMIS Increase Social Capital? 195
How Do Organisations Solve the What is the Value of Social Capital? 195
Problems of Information Silos? 163 GREEN IT GUIDE Environmental Monitoring
An Enterprise System for Patient Information Systems 196
Discharge 163
How Do Social Networks Add Value
GUIDE The Flavour-of-the-Month Club 164 to Businesses? 198
Business Process Reengineering 166 Using Social Networking to Increase
Q3 How Do CRM, ERP and EAI Support Enterprise the Number of Relationships 198
Systems? 167 Using Social Networks to Increase
the Strength of Relationships 199
ETHICS GUIDE Dialling for Dollars 168
Connecting to Those with
Customer Relationship Management More Assets 200
(CRM) 170
EXPERIENCING MIS INCLASS 8
EXPERIENCING MIS INCLASS 7 Calculating Your Social Capital 201
Choosing a CRM Product 171
Q4 How Can Organisations Manage
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) 172 the Risks of Social Media? 202
Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) 173
Managing the Risk of Employee
What Are the Challenges when Communication 202
Implementing and Upgrading
Managing the Risk of
Enterprise Systems? 174
User-Generated Content 203
Q4 How Do Inter-Enterprise Information
Q5 Where Is Social Media Taking Us? 204
Systems Solve the Problems of
Enterprise Silos? 176 GUIDE Social Recruiting 206
HOW DOES THE KNOWLEDGE IN THIS CHAPTER HOW DOES THE KNOWLEDGE IN THIS
HELP KERRIE AND YOU? 178 CHAPTER HELP KERRIE AND YOU? 208
Active Review 178 Active Review 209
Key Terms and Concepts 179 Key Terms and Concepts 209
Using Your Knowledge 179 Using Your Knowledge 209
Collaboration Exercise 7 180 Collaboration Exercise 8 210
CASE STUDY 7 Renovate or CASE STUDY 8 Tourism Holdings
Detonate? 182 Limited (THL) 210
CHAPTER 8 CHAPTER 9
SOCIAL MEDIA INFORMATION BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE
SYSTEMS 184 SYSTEMS 213
THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU 184 THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU 213
STUDY QUESTIONS 185 STUDY QUESTIONS 214
Q1 What Is a Social Media Information Q1 How Do Organisations Use Business
System (SMIS)? 185 Intelligence (BI) Systems? 214
Three SMIS Roles 186 How Do Organisations Use BI? 215
SMIS Components 188 What Are Typical Uses for BI? 216
Q2 How Do SMIS Advance Q2 What Are the Three Primary
Organisational Strategy? 190 Activities in the BI Process? 218
x CONTENTS
Using Business Intelligence For Decision STUDY QUESTIONS 255

Making: An Example 218
Q1 What Is Systems Development? 255
GUIDE Counting and Counting
and Counting 224 Q2 Why Is Systems Development Difficult
and Risky? 256
Q3 How Do Organisations Use Data Warehouses
and Data Marts to Acquire Data? 226 The Difficulty of Determining Requirements 256
Problems With Operational Data 228 Changes in Requirements 256
EXPERIENCING MIS INCLASS 9 Scheduling and Budgeting Difficulties 257
What Singularity Have We Wrought? 230 Changing Technology 258
Data Warehouses Versus Data Marts 231 Diseconomies of Scale 258
Q4 What Are Three Techniques for Is it Really So Bleak? 258
Processing BI Data? 232 Q3 What Are the Five Phases of the Systems
Reporting Analysis 233 Development Life Cycle? 259
Data Mining Analysis 233 Q4 How Is System Definition
BigData 234 Accomplished? 260
MapReduce 234 Define System Goals and Scope 260
Hadoop 234 Assess Feasibility 261
Q5 What Are the Alternatives for Form a Project Team 261
Publishing BI? 236 GREEN IT GUIDE Green Information
Characteristics of BI Publishing Alternatives 236 Systems 262
What Are the Two Functions of a EXPERIENCING MIS INCLASS 10
BI Server? 237 GardenTracker 264
ETHICS GUIDE Unseen Cyberazzi 238 Q5 What Is the Users’ Role in the
Requirements Phase? 265
HOW DOES THE KNOWLEDGE IN THIS
CHAPTER HELP KERRIE AND YOU? 240 Determine Requirements 265
Active Review 240 Approve Requirements 267
Key Terms and Concepts 241 Role of a Prototype 267
Using Your Knowledge 241 Q6 How Are the Five Components
Designed? 267
CASE STUDY 9 Tourism Holdings
Hardware Design 267
Limited (THL) (cont.) 242 Software Design 268
Database Design 268
PART 3 REVIEW 246 Procedure Design 268
Consider Your Net Worth 246 Design of Job Descriptions 268
Application Exercises 246 Q7 How Is an Information System
PART 3 CASE STUDY Switched on to Data Implemented? 269
at JB Hi-Fi 250 System Testing 269
System Conversion 270
Q8 What Are the Tasks for System
PART 4 Maintenance? 271
GUIDE The Real Estimation Process 272
Information Systems Q9 What Are Some of the Problems with
Management 252 the SDLC? 274
THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU 252 The SDLC Waterfall 274

Requirements Documentation Difficulty 274
Scheduling and Budgeting Difficulties 275
CHAPTER 10 HOW DOES THE KNOWLEDGE IN THIS
INFORMATION SYSTEMS CHAPTER HELP $RU AND YOU? 275
DEVELOPMENT 254
Active Review 275
THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU 254 Key Terms and Concepts 276
CONTENTS xi
Using Your Knowledge 276 CHAPTER 12

Collaboration Exercise 10 277 INFORMATION SECURITY
CASE STUDY 10 User Involvement at MANAGEMENT 301
Northern Territory Asset Management 277
STUDY QUESTIONS 302
CHAPTER 11 Q1 What Is the Goal of Information Systems
INFORMATION SYSTEMS Security? 302
MANAGEMENT 279 The IT/IS Security Threat/
Loss Scenario 302
What Are the Sources of Threats? 303
STUDY QUESTIONS 280
What Types of Security Loss Exist? 304
Q1 What Are the Functions and Organisation Goal of Information Systems Security 307
of the IT/IS Department? 280
EXPERIENCING MIS INCLASS 12 Phishing
How Is the IT/IS Department for Credit Cards, Identifying Numbers and
Organised? 280 Bank Accounts 307
EXPERIENCING MIS INCLASS 11 Q2 How Big Is the Computer
What’s That Humming Sound? 281 Security Problem? 308
What IT/IS-related Job Positions Exist? 283
Q3 How Should You Respond to Security
Q2 How Do Organisations Plan the Threats? 310
Use of IT/IS? 284
Q4 How Should Organisations Respond to
Align Information Systems with Security Threats? 312
Organisational Strategy 284
Communicate IT/IS Issues to the Q5 How Can Technical Safeguards Protect
Executive Group 285 Against Security Threats? 313
Develop Priorities and Enforce Them Identification and Authentication 313
Within the IT/IS Department 285 Encryption 314
Sponsor the Steering Committee 286 Firewalls 316
Q3 What Are the Advantages and Disadvantages Malware Protection 317
of Outsourcing? 286 Design for Secure Applications 318
Outsourcing Information Systems 286 Q6 How Can Data Safeguards Protect Against
International Outsourcing 288 Security Threats? 318
What Are Popular Outsourcing Q7 How Can Human Safeguards Protect Against
Alternatives? 288 Security Threats? 319
What Are the Risks of Outsourcing? 289 Human Safeguards for Employees 319
GUIDE Is Outsourcing Fool’s Gold? 292 GREEN IT GUIDE Green Fatigue? 320
Q4 What Are Your User Rights and Account Administration 323
Responsibilities? 294 Security Monitoring 325
Your User Rights 294 Q8 How Should Organisations Respond to
Your User Responsibilities 295 Security Incidents? 325
ETHICS GUIDE Using the Corporate GUIDE Is It Spying or Just Good
Computer 296 Management? 326
HOW DOES THE KNOWLEDGE IN THIS GUIDE The Final, Final Word 328
HOW DOES THE KNOWLEDGE IN THIS
Active Review 298
Active Review 330
CASE STUDY 11 IT Development
and Acquisition at Australian Bureau Collaboration Exercise 12 332
of Statistics 299 CASE STUDY 12 Cybercrime on the Rise 333
xii CONTENTS
PART 4 REVIEW 334 Q3 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools to

Share Content? 359
Consider Your Net Worth 334
Shared Content with No Control 361
Application Exercises 335
Shared Content with Version Management
PART 4 CASE STUDY The Need for Technical on Google Drive 361
Feasibility 339
Shared Content with Version Control 363
Q4 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools
CHAPTER EXTENSIONS 341 to Manage Tasks? 366
Sharing a Task List on Google Grid 367
Chapter Extension 1 Collaboration
Information Systems for Decision Making, Sharing a Task List Using Microsoft
Problem Solving and Project Management 342 SharePoint 367
STUDY QUESTIONS 342 Q5 Which Collaboration Information System
Is Right for Your Team? 370
Q1 What Are the Two Key Characteristics of The Minimal Collaboration Tool Set 370
Collaboration? 342
The Good Collaboration Tool Set 370
Importance of Effective Critical Feedback 343
The Comprehensive Collaboration
Guidelines for Giving and Receiving Critical Tool Set 371
Feedback 344
Choosing the Set for Your Team 371
Warning! 344
Don’t Forget Procedures and People! 372
Q2 What Are the Three Criteria for Successful Active Review 373
Collaboration? 345
Successful Outcome 345
Growth in Team Capability 345
Meaningful and Satisfying Experience 346 Chapter Extension 3 Mobile Systems 375
Q3 What Are the Four Primary Purposes of STUDY QUESTIONS 375
Collaboration? 346
Q1 What Are Mobile Systems? 375
Becoming Informed 346
Making Decisions 347 Q2 Why Are Mobile Systems Important? 376
Solving Problems 349 Hardware 376
Managing Projects 349 Software 377
Q4 What Are the Components and Functions Data 377
of a Collaboration Information System? 351 Procedures 378
The Five Collaboration System Components 351 People 378
Primary Functions: Communication and Q3 How Do Native and Browser-based Mobile
Content Sharing 351 Applications Compare? 379
Active Review 352 Developing Native Mobile Applications 379
Key Terms and Concepts 353 Developing Thin-Client Mobile
Using Your Knowledge 353 Applications 380
Which Is Better? 382
Chapter Extension 2 Collaboration Q4 What Characterises Quality Mobile User
Information Systems for Experiences? 382
Student Projects 354 Feature Content 383
STUDY QUESTIONS 354 Use Context-Sensitive Chrome 383
Q1 What Are the IS Requirements for Provide Animation and Lively Behaviour 383
Student Project Collaborations? 354 Design to Scale and Share 383
Required Features 355 Use the Cloud 384
Nice-to-Have Features 355 Q5 What Are the Challenges of Personal Mobile
Collaboration Tool Characteristics 355 Devices at Work? 386
Q2 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools to Advantages and Disadvantages of
Improve Team Communication? 356 Employee Use of Mobile Systems at Work 386
CONTENTS xiii
Survey of Organisational BYOD Policy 387 Starting Access 425

Active Review 389 Creating Tables 426
Key Terms and Concepts 389 Q2 How Do You Create Relationships? 430
Using Your Knowledge 389 Q3 How Do You Create a Data Entry Form? 433
Q4 How Can You Create Queries Using the
Chapter Extension 4 Introduction to Query Design Tool? 436
Microsoft Excel 2013 390
Q5 How Do You Create a Report? 439
STUDY QUESTIONS 390
Active Review 443
Q1 What Is a Spreadsheet? 390 Using Your Knowledge 443
Q2 How Do You Get Started with Excel? 391
Chapter Extension 7 Using Excel and
Q3 How Can You Enter Data? 394
Access Together 444
Key in the Data 394 STUDY QUESTIONS 444
Let Excel Add the Data Using a Pattern 395
Q1 Why Use Excel and Access Together? 444
Q4 How Can You Insert and Delete Rows
and Columns and Change Their Size? 398 Q2 What Is Import/Export? 445
Q5 How Can You Format Data? 401 Import/Export of Text Data 445
Q6 How Can You Create a (Simple) Formula? 402 Import/Export of Excel and Access Data 449
Q3 How Can You Create Charts with Excel? 449
Q7 How Can You Print Results? 405
Creating a Pie Chart 449
Active Review 407
Creating a Column Chart 449
Using Your Knowledge 408 Q4 How Can You Create Group Totals in Access? 453
Q5 How Can You Use Excel to Graph
Access Data? 458
Chapter Extension 5 Database Design 409
Q6 How Can You Use Access to Report Excel Data?461
STUDY QUESTIONS 409
Q7 How Can You Combine Excel and Access
Q1 Who Will Volunteer? 409 to Analyse Data? 467
Q2 How Are Database Application Systems Active Review 471
Developed? 409 Key Terms and Concepts 472
Q3 What Are the Components of the Entity- Using Your Knowledge 472
Relationship Data Model? 411
Entities 411 Chapter Extension 8 Network and Cloud
Relationships 412 Technology 473
Q4 How Is a Data Model Transformed into STUDY QUESTIONS 473
a Database Design? 414 Q1 What Is a Computer Network? 473
Normalisation 414
Q2 What Are the Components of a LAN? 474
Representing Relationships 416
Connecting Your LAN to the Internet 475
Q5 What Is the Users’ Role? 418
Q3 How Does the Internet Work? 476
Q6 Who Will Volunteer? (continued) 420
An Internet Example 477
Active Review 422 Internet Addressing 477
Key Terms and Concepts 423 Processing on a Web Server 479
Q4 How Does the Cloud Work? 480
Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) 480
Chapter Extension 6 Using Microsoft Protocols Supporting Web Services 483
Access 2013 424
Active Review 486
STUDY QUESTIONS 424
Q1 How Do You Create Tables? 424 Using Your Knowledge 487
xiv CONTENTS
Chapter Extension 9 Enterprise Resource Structure and Control Become Messy 512
Planning (ERP) Systems 488 How Can Social Media Information
STUDY QUESTIONS 488 Systems (SMIS) Foster Hyper-Social
Organisations? 512
Q1 What Is the Purpose of ERP Systems? 488
Q2 What Are the Benefits of Knowledge
Q2 What Are the Elements of an ERP Solution? 491 Management? 514
ERP Application Programs 491 Q3 What Are Expert Systems? 515
ERP Databases 492 Q4 What Are Content Management Systems? 516
Business Process Procedures 492
What Are the Challenges of Content
Training and Consulting 493 Management? 516
Q3 How Are ERP Systems Implemented What Are Content Management Application
and Upgraded? 494 Alternatives? 518
Q4 What Types of Organisations Use ERP? 495 Q5 How Do Hyper-Social Organisations Manage
ERP By Industry Type 495 Knowledge? 519
ERP By Organisation Size 496 Hyper-Social KM Alternative Media 519
International ERP 496 Resistance to Hyper-Social Knowledge Sharing 520
Q5 How Do the Major ERP Vendors Compare? 497 Active Review 521
ERP Market Leaders 497
ERP Products 497
ERP in the Cloud 500 Chapter Extension 12 Database Marketing 522
Active Review 500 STUDY QUESTIONS 522
Q1 What Is a Database Marketing Opportunity? 522
Q2 How Does RFM Analysis Classify Customers? 522
Chapter Extension 10 Supply Chain Q3 How Does Market-Basket Analysis Identify
Management 502 Cross-Selling Opportunities? 523
STUDY QUESTIONS 502 Q4 How Do Decision Trees Identify
Market Segments? 525
Q1 What Are Typical Inter-Enterprise Processes? 502
A Decision Tree For Student Performance 525
Q2 What Is a Supply Chain? 502
A Decision Tree For Loan Evaluation 527
Q3 What Factors Affect Supply Chain Active Review 529
Performance? 504
Q4 How Does Supply Chain Profitability Differ Using Your Knowledge 529
from Organisational Profitability? 505
Q5 What Is the Bullwhip Effect? 506 Chapter Extension 13 Reporting Systems
and OLAP 530
Q6 How Do Information Systems Affect
Supply Chain Performance? 507 STUDY QUESTIONS 530
Active Review 508 Q1 How Do Reporting Systems Enable People
Key Terms and Concepts 509 to Create Information? 530
Using Your Knowledge 509 Q2 What Are the Components and
Characteristics of Reporting Systems? 532
Chapter Extension 11 Hyper-Social Report Type 533
Organisations and Knowledge Management 510 Report Media 534
STUDY QUESTIONS 510 Report Mode 534
Q1 What Are the Characteristics of a Q3 How Are Reports Authored, Managed and
Hyper-Social Organisation? 510 Delivered? 534
Consumers Become Humans 510 Report Authoring 535
Market Segments Become Tribes 511 Report Management 535
Channels Become Networks 511 Report Delivery 536
CONTENTS xv
Q4 How Are Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) Chapter Extension 16 Business Process
Reports Dynamic? 536 Management 562
Active Review 539 STUDY QUESTIONS 562
Q1 Why Do Organisations Need to Manage
Using Your Knowledge 540 Business Processes? 562
A Sample Ordering Business Process 562
Chapter Extension 14 Systems Why Does This Process Need Management? 562
Development Project Management 541
Q2 What Are the Stages of Business Process
STUDY QUESTIONS 541 Management (BPM)? 564
Q1 Why Is Formalised Project Management Q3 How Do Business Processes and Information
Necessary? 541 Systems Relate? 566
Q2 What Are the Trade-offs in Requirements, Q4 Which Comes First, Business Processes or
Cost and Time? 542 Information Systems? 567
Q3 What Are the Dimensions of Project Business Processes First 568
Management? 544 Information System First 568
Q4 How Does a Work-Breakdown Structure Drive Another Factor: Off-the-Shelf Software 569
Project Management? 545 And the Answer Is … 569
Q5 What Is the Biggest Challenge in Q5 How Is BPM Practised in the Real World? 570
Planning a Large-scale Systems Defining the Process Problem 570
Development Project? 548
Designing the New Process 572
Q6 What Are the Biggest Challenges in Create Process Components 573
Managing a Large-scale Systems
Development Project? 549 Implement New Processes 573
Active Review 573
Q7 What Is the Single Most Important Task
for Users on a Large-scale Systems Key Terms and Concepts 574
Development Project? 551 Using Your Knowledge 574
Active Review 552
Key Terms and Concepts 553 Chapter Extension 17 International MIS 575
Using Your Knowledge 553 STUDY QUESTIONS 575
Q1 How Does the Global Economy Impact
Organisations and Processes? 575
Chapter Extension 15 Agile Development 554
STUDY QUESTIONS 554 How Does the Global Economy Change the
Competitive Environment? 576
Q1 Why Is the SDLC Losing Credibility? 554 How Does the Emerging Global Economy
Q2 What Are the Principles of Agile Development Change Competitive Strategy? 577
Methodologies? 555 How Does the Global Economy Change
Value Chains and Business Processes? 577
Q3 What Is the Scrum Process? 556
Q2 What Are the Characteristics of International
Scrum Essentials 556 IS Components? 578
When Are We Done? 557
What Is Required to Localise Software? 578
Key Roles 558
What Are the Problems and Issues of Global
Q4 How Do Requirements Drive the Databases? 579
Scrum Process? 558
Q3 What Are the Challenges of International
Creating Requirements Tasks 558 Enterprise Applications? 580
Scheduling Tasks 559 Advantages of Functional Systems 580
Committing to Finish Tasks 559 Problems of Inherent Processes 581
Hocus-Pocus? 560 Q4 How Do Inter-Enterprise IS Facilitate
Active Review 560 Globalisation? 581
Key Terms and Concepts 561 How Do Global Information Systems Affect
Using Your Knowledge 561 Supply Chain Profitability? 581
xvi CONTENTS
What Is the Economic Impact of Global How Does the International Dimension
Manufacturing? 582 Affect Computer Security Risk
How Does Web 2.0 and Social Media Affect Management? 587
International Business? 582 Active Review 587
Q5 What Are the Challenges of International Key Terms and Concepts 588
IS Management? 583 Using Your Knowledge 588
Why Is International Information Systems
Glossary 589
Development More Challenging? 583
Index 601
What Are the Challenges of International
Project Management? 584
What Are the Challenges of International
IT/IS Management? 586
Preface
Experiencing MIS is the title and theme of this book. It is an important theme because no matter
what you do in business, you will experience MIS. Whether you work in accounting, marketing,
finance, operations, management, human resources—whatever your business specialty—you will
experience MIS.
Because experiencing MIS is a given, the only important question is: What kind of an
experience will you have? Will you be a helpless user, one who says, ‘I don’t know anything about
computers, and I don’t want to’? Or will you be a manager who says, ‘I know there’s a way to use
information systems to improve the productivity of my department’? Will you be someone who
finds an innovative application of information technology to push your company ahead of the
competition? Or, will you be the user who ‘doesn’t get it’?
Relating This Text to Your Business Career

Many students think this is a book about using a computer. It is not. Experiencing MIS is not
the same as computer literacy. Some students think the primary goal of this book is to teach
you Excel or Access. Although you may expand your knowledge of using those products while
reading this book, you will do so on the way to learning something far more important: how to
use computer-based systems to better accomplish business goals and objectives—your personal
ones and those for the business in which you work.
Experiencing MIS is not something you will wait to do 20 years down the road when you are
a general manager of whatever. It starts your first day on the job. Imagine yourself that day,
hired by the company you really want to work for. What happens that first day? Typically, your
supervisor first gives you a desk and then assigns you a computer.
What are you going to do with that computer? Send emails to your parents? Surf the web?
IM your friends? Are you even allowed to use your work computer for personal email, Facebook
or Twitter? (Maybe.) Can your employer read the emails you send from work? (Yes, definitely.)
Will your employer read the email you send from work? (Maybe.) But, more importantly, what
are you going to DO with that computer to help your career? To help your department? To give
your organisation a competitive advantage?
Here’s the good news: You don’t have to wait until that first day to start experiencing
MIS. This book is designed to help you experience MIS right now—at university where you
can exercise your ‘inquiring mind’ without ruining your business reputation. Use Google
Docs and Spreadsheets, or Microsoft SharePoint, or some other software to facilitate the
exercises. Experience MIS now, where you can propose infeasible projects, and where you
can develop ideas that are not just ‘out of the box’, but that are truly innovative and future
oriented. Do it now while you have the support of a department of knowledgeable
professionals (your lecturers and professors) who are there to provide you consulting, at no
extra charge!
xvii
xviii PREFACE
Why This Fourth Australian Edition?

Events in management information systems move fast and to keep the text current, we check
every sentence and every industry reference for obsolescence. For example, the third edition’s
glorification of Apple’s success in Chapter 4 needed to be softened given Apple’s recent
experience. The excitement about Microsoft Surface that was prevalent when we wrote the third
edition had to be placed into context of Surface’s mediocre success, and indeed, its name change.
So, numerous changes, as listed in Table 1, were made throughout the chapters in an attempt to
keep them up to date and relevant to the Australian context.
As shown in the table below, changes were made to every chapter. One of the major changes
is the rewrite of Chapter 6 to focus entirely on the cloud. Data communications technology is
presented only in its role as supporting the cloud. We have also included new material on social
media information systems given their growing importance for business.
Also, some material included in the chapters of the third edition has been moved to chapter
extensions in the fourth edition. We hope this offers increased flexibility: the core chapters cover
fundamental MIS principles, but you can (and should!) use the chapter extensions to delve
deeper where it matters most for your own learning.
Changes in the Fourth Australian Edition

Chapter Description of change
1 New employment data and updated job requirements from Australian Government
1 New Guide: Five-Component Careers
1 New Ethics Guide: Ethics and Professional Responsibility
2 Adoption of business process modelling notation (BPMN)

Extended coverage of process quality and how information systems contribute to improving process quality
3 Improved coverage of Porter’s Five Forces and competitive strategy
3 New InClass Exercise: Competitive Strategy Over the Web
3 New Case Study: Competitive Advantage at National Australia Bank
4 Updated hardware specifications to reflect current industry norms. Introduced mobile operating systems
and different kinds of virtualisation
4 New InClass Exercise: Microsoft Surface changed from table computing to tablet computing
4 New Collaboration Exercise: Microsoft PixelSense
5 Extended database applications to include thin-client, browser-based apps
5 New Case Study: Is Australia’s Electronic Health Record the Cure We’ve Been Waiting for?
6 Entire chapter rewritten to focus entirely on the cloud. Incorporated $RU’s use of the cloud. Introduced
topic of cloud security
6 New InClass Exercise: What, Exactly, Does That Standard Mean?
6 New Guide: You Said What? About Me? In Class?
7 Updated chapter to take advantage of new content in Chapter 6
7 New case study: Renovate or detonate?
8 Entire chapter rewritten to focus on Social Media Information Systems
8 New Guide: Social Recruiting
PREFACE xix
Chapter Description of change

9 Updated with more depth on business intelligence and less on reporting
9 New InClass Exercise: What Singularity Have We Wrought?
9 New Ethics Guide: Unseen Cyberazzi
Part 3 New Case Study: Switched on to Data at JB Hi-Fi

Review
10 Improved coverage of the role of prototyping
10 New Case Study: User Involvement at Northern Territory Asset Management
11 Updated information systems jobs and related salary data

Extended coverage of aligning information systems with organisational strategy
Coverage of outsourcing included in chapter (previously covered in a chapter extension)
11 New Case Study: IT Development and Acquisition at Australian Bureau of Statistics
12 Updated coverage of goals and aims of information systems security

Updated computer crime statistics
Updated coverage of responses to security threats and incidents
12 New Guide: Is It Spying or Just Good Management?
Using This Book

Every part and every chapter in this book starts with a real-life business scenario of someone
experiencing MIS. For example, you can read about Kerrie Dehaviland from $RU Financial Planning.
Kerrie wanted to sponsor a CRM system to provide information to an office of extremely demanding
financial planners. Her system had to be very professional and it needed the blessing of her boss, Murray
Williams. How would you proceed if that idea occurred to you? How did Kerrie proceed? Each chapter
will give you guidance to apply fundamental information systems knowledge to business scenarios.
The book consists of four parts and three chapters within each part. The chapters are
relatively short and describe the minimum essentials of each topic. Additional material on each
chapter topic can then be found in ‘Chapter Extensions’, which are grouped together near the
back of the book. Some of the chapter extensions extend the technical content of a chapter and
others extend the business/management content of a chapter.
Every chapter and chapter extension starts with a list of questions. Read those questions.
Read the text material. Apply the knowledge to the scenario. Do the activities in the ‘Active
Review’. You can stop reading when you know you can answer the list of questions.
Chapter Guides
Every chapter has two ‘Guides’. The guides present situations or case studies that relate to the
implementation and/or use of information systems in practice. Each is followed by discussion
questions that you can use formally or informally to discuss the issues and points raised in the
guide. The experience of hearing others’ ideas and sharing your own is good practice for almost
any career you choose to pursue.
Each chapter has a guide that describes a scenario that will help you experience MIS now,
today. These guides present real-world examples related to some aspect of the topics covered in
the relevant chapter. There are twelve of these guides.
The odd-numbered chapters also have an Ethics Guide. An essential characteristic of a
profession is the need for its practitioners/members to subscribe to a set of values and ideals
xx PREFACE
that uphold and advance the honour, dignity and effectiveness of that profession. Essentially a
profession has a contract with the community and will govern its practitioners/members to
protect the public interest. This is often achieved through a code of ethics which requires
practitioners/members to act with professional responsibility and integrity. The IS profession is
no different and the major professional societies (e.g., the Australian Computer Society in Australia)
publish codes of professional conduct and professional practice to guide their members.
Courts and other tribunals will use such codes when considering your actions, if you carry
out IS work. The ethics guides present examples of behaviour that raise questions regarding
ethical values. There are six of these guides.
The even-number chapters also have a Green IT Guide. IT contributes an estimated 2 per cent
of global carbon emissions and as much as 5 per cent of developed nations’ emissions. IT
contributes more than 20 per cent of the energy used in a typical office building but also
contributes through the toxic problems of electronic waste disposal. ‘Green IT’ refers to
environmentally sustainable computing—‘the practice of maximising the efficient use of
computing resources to minimise environmental impact . . . controlling and reducing a product’s
environmental footprint by minimising the use of hazardous materials, energy, water, and other
scarce resources, as well as minimising waste from manufacturing and throughout the supply
chain’ but also ‘the impact of IT service strategies on the firm’s and customers’ societal bottom
line to include economic, environmental, and social responsibility criteria for defining
organisational success’.1 There are six of these guides.
We hope you will experience MIS today, so that you are as ready as you can be to participate
in the incredible opportunities coming your way. During your career, information systems will
have a profound impact on business organisations. Business is a social activity. People ‘do
business’ with other people. Ubiquitous access to the internet coupled with the rise of mobile
devices has already radically changed how people relate, and further changes to how we relate
will continue throughout your career as technology advances. Organisations will be virtual;
people will work closely together, yet may never meet in person. Many jobs and tasks performed
today will be eliminated, and jobs unforeseen today will become careers and professions. All this
change will be animated by people experiencing MIS.
So, start your experience. Turn to page 2 and read about Kerrie. Ask yourself what you would
do if you were ‘in her shoes’. And don’t forget to have some fun— experiencing MIS now!
David Kroenke, Whidbey Island, Washington, USA

David Wilson, UTS Business School, University of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia and
University of Canberra, ACT, Australia
Wayne Brookes, University of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia
1 R. R. Harmon and N. Auseklis 2009, ‘Sustainable IT Services: Assessing the Impact of Green Computing Practices’, Portland International Center for
Management of Engineering and Technology (PICMET) Conference Proceedings, 2–6 August, Portland, Oregon, USA.
About the Authors
David Kroenke has many years of teaching experience at Colorado State University, Seattle University,
and the University of Washington. He has led dozens of seminars for college professors on the teaching
of information systems and technology; in 1991, the International Association of Information Systems
named him Computer Educator of the Year. In 2009, David was named Educator of the Year by the
Association of Information Technology Professionals-Education Special Interest Group (AITP-EDSIG).
David worked for the U.S. Air Force and Boeing Computer Services. He was a principal in the
startup of three companies, serving as the vice president of product marketing and development
for the Microrim Corporation and as chief of database technologies for Wall Data, Inc. He is the
father of the semantic object data model. David’s consulting clients have included IBM, Microsoft,
and Computer Sciences Corporation, as well as numerous smaller companies. Recently, David
has focused on using information systems for teaching collaboration and teamwork.
Associate Professor David Wilson is Course Director, UTS BBus (Shanghai) in the Business
School at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). His teaching and research interests are in
project management, software quality assurance, software process improvement and information
systems management.
David has spent over 30 years as an academic, including eight years as Associate Dean
(Teaching and Learning) in the Faculty of Information Technology at UTS. Previously, David
gained 10 years of practical experience in the development of management information systems
before moving to academe in 1982.
David has made significant contributions to the professional community including terms as
President of the Australian Council of Professors and Heads of Information Systems, President of the
Australasian Association of Information Systems, Editor of the Australian Computer Journal (for five
years) and Chairman of the Software Quality Association (NSW). He has also served on the programme
committees of two international software quality conferences and has presented a number of papers
on software process improvement and software quality at international conferences.
Dr Wayne Brookes is a senior lecturer in Computing and Communications in the Faculty of
Engineering and Information Technology at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). He teaches
in the areas of web application development, web services and e-commerce innovation, and researches
in topics related to networking and distributed systems and approaches to teaching and learning.
Wayne completed his studies in Queensland, and then moved to Sydney to join UTS. He has
now worked as an academic for close to 20 years in total. He also previously spent a period of
time working for a national research centre on distributed computing, with responsibility for
technology transfer and training, including consulting projects.
Wayne has taken on a variety of academic roles ranging from undergraduate course director for
information technology, to postgraduate director, and Associate Dean (Teaching and Learning). He
has been heavily involved in university course accreditation processes, and spent a period as chair of
the Teaching and Learning Committee. Wayne also has a keen interest in international education, and
currently counsels prospective international students on study options and career paths.
xxi
Learning Aids
We have structured this book so you can maximise the benefit from the time you spend reading
it. As shown in the table below, each chapter includes a series of learning aids to help you succeed
in this course.
Resource Description Benefit Example

‘This Could Happen to You’ Parts and chapters open with a running Sets up the chapter Kerrie’s CRM at
(located at the start of each business scenario, the likes of which content and provides $RU, pp. 2–3
part and each chapter) could entwine you in just a few years. an obvious example
of why the chapter is
relevant to you.
Question-Driven Chapter These queries, and the subsequent Identify the main p. 5
Learning Objectives chapter sections written around them, point of the section.
focus your attention and make your When you can
reading more efficient. answer each
question, you’ve
learned the main
point of the section.
Guides Each chapter includes two guides that Stimulate thought pp. 14–15
focus on current issues relating to and discussion. Help
information systems. One of the two develop your
deals with an ethical or Green IT issue. problem-solving
skills. Help you learn
to respond to ethical
or sustainability
dilemmas in
business.
Experiencing MIS InClass Each chapter includes an InClass Provide you with an pp. 11–12
Exercises Exercise that is designed to help you opportunity to apply
apply your knowledge in short the knowledge you
exercises. have gained to a
realistic situation.
‘How Does the Knowledge in This section revisits the opening Summarises the p. 20
This Chapter Help . . . You?’ scenario and discusses what the ‘takeaway’ points
(near the end of each chapter) chapter taught you about it. from the chapter as
they apply to the
person in the story,
and to you.
Active Review Each chapter concludes with a Offers a review of p. 20

summary-and-review section, organised important points in
around the chapter’s study questions. the chapter. If you
can answer the
questions posed, you
will understand the
material.
xxii
LEARNING AIDS xxiii
Resource Description Benefit Example

Key Terms and Concepts Highlight the major terms and concepts Provide a summary p. 21
with their appropriate page reference. of key terms for
review before
examinations.
‘Using Your Knowledge’ These exercises ask you to take your Tests your critical p. 21
new knowledge one step further by thinking skills and
applying it to a practice problem. keeps reminding you
that you are learning
material that applies
to the real world.
Collaboration Exercise A team exercise that applies the Use Google Docs & p. 21
chapter’s topic. Spreadsheets,
Microsoft OneDrive,
Microsoft SharePoint
or some other tool to
collaborate on team
answers.
Case Study A case study closes each chapter. You Requires you to pp. 22–23
will reflect on the use in real apply newly acquired
organisations of the technology or knowledge to real
systems presented in the chapter and situations.
recommend solutions to business
problems.
‘Consider Your Net Worth’ These exercises ask you to think about Helps you see ways p. 63
(in the review section at the how you can use the text material in that the knowledge
end of each part) your career. from your study of
the text can give you
a competitive
advantage in the
marketplace.
‘Application Exercises’ (in the These exercises ask you to solve Help develop your pp. 63–64
review section at the end of business problems using spreadsheet computer skills.
each part) (Excel) or database (Access)
applications.
‘Part Case’ (at the end of A case study, similar to the case studies Requires you to pp. 65–67
each part) at the end of each chapter, apply knowledge
demonstrates how real organisations gained from several
use the technology or systems chapters to real
presented in the part. business situations.
Glossary (end of book) A comprehensive list includes Provides one place p. 589
definitions of the key terms. for your quick review
of terms and
concepts.
Downloadable Activity Files

To further assist you when working on particular concepts, pre-prepared files in Microsoft Excel,
Access and Visio, referred to in the text, have been provided for you to download from <www.
pearson.com.au/9781486019281>.
Making the Most of Your
Resources
MyMISLab for Kroenke/Wilson/Brookes
Experiencing MIS, 4th edition
A guided tour for students and educators
www.pearson.com.au/kroenke4
Auto-generated Tests and
Assignments
Each MyLab comes with pre-loaded
quizzes, all of which are
automatically graded.
Assignable Content
Educators can select content from
the Study Plan, Multimedia, and/or
Test Bank and assign to students as
homework or quizzes.
xxiv
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
which Nietzsche, in a fragmentary preface to his incomplete master-
work, deliberately and correctly called the Coming of Nihilism. Every
one of the great Cultures knows it, for it is of deep necessity inherent
in the finale of these mighty organisms. Socrates was a nihilist, and
Buddha. There is an Egyptian or an Arabian or a Chinese de-souling
of the human being, just as there is a Western. This is a matter not
of mere political and economic, nor even of religious and artistic,
transformations, nor of any tangible or factual change whatsoever,
but of the condition of a soul after it has actualized its possibilities in
full. It is easy, but useless, to point to the bigness of Hellenistic and
of modern European achievement. Mass slavery and mass machine-
production, “Progress” and Ataraxia, Alexandrianism and modern
Science, Pergamum and Bayreuth, social conditions as assumed in
Aristotle and as assumed in Marx, are merely symptoms on the
historical surface. Not external life and conduct, not institutions and
customs, but deepest and last things are in question here—the
inward finishedness (Fertigsein) of megalopolitan man, and of the
provincial as well.[436] For the Classical world this condition sets in
with the Roman age; for us it will set in from about the year 2000.
Culture and Civilization—the living body of a soul and the mummy
of it. For Western existence the distinction lies at about the year
1800—on the one side of that frontier life in fullness and sureness of
itself, formed by growth from within, in one great uninterrupted
evolution from Gothic childhood to Goethe and Napoleon, and on the
other the autumnal, artificial, rootless life of our great cities, under
forms fashioned by the intellect. Culture and Civilization—the
organism born of Mother Earth, and the mechanism proceeding from
hardened fabric. Culture-man lives inwards, Civilization-man
outwards in space and amongst bodies and “facts.” That which the
one feels as Destiny the other understands as a linkage of causes
and effects, and thenceforward he is a materialist—in the sense of
the word valid for, and only valid for, Civilization—whether he wills it
or no, and whether Buddhist, Stoic or Socialist doctrines wear the
garb of religion or not.
To Gothic and Doric men, Ionic and Baroque men, the whole vast
form-world of art, religion, custom, state, knowledge, social life was
easy. They could carry it and actualize it without “knowing” it. They
had over the symbolism of the Culture that unstrained mastery that
Mozart possessed in music. Culture is the self-evident. The feeling of
strangeness in these forms, the idea that they are a burden from
which creative freedom requires to be relieved, the impulse to
overhaul the stock in order by the light of reason to turn it to better
account, the fatal imposition of thought upon the inscrutable quality
of creativeness, are all symptoms of a soul that is beginning to tire.
Only the sick man feels his limbs. When men construct an
unmetaphysical religion in opposition to cults and dogmas; when a
“natural law” is set up against historical law; when, in art, styles are
invented in place of the style that can no longer be borne or
mastered; when men conceive of the State as an “order of society”
which not only can be but must be altered[437]—then it is evident that
something has definitely broken down. The Cosmopolis itself, the
supreme Inorganic, is there, settled in the midst of the Culture-
landscape, whose men it is uprooting, drawing into itself and using
up.
Scientific worlds are superficial worlds, practical, soulless and
purely extensive worlds. The ideas of Buddhism, of Stoicism, and of
Socialism alike rest upon them.[438] Life is no longer to be lived as
something self-evident—hardly a matter of consciousness, let alone
choice—or to be accepted as God-willed destiny, but is to be treated
as a problem, presented as the intellect sees it, judged by “utilitarian”
or “rational” criteria. This, at the back, is what all three mean. The
brain rules, because the soul abdicates. Culture-men live
unconsciously, Civilization-men consciously. The Megalopolis—
sceptical, practical, artificial—alone represents Civilization to-day.
The soil-peasantry before its gates does not count. The “People”
means the city-people, an inorganic mass, something fluctuating.
The peasant is not democratic—this again being a notion belonging
to mechanical and urban existence[439]—and he is therefore
overlooked, despised, detested. With the vanishing of the old
“estates”—gentry and priesthood—he is the only organic man, the
sole relic of the Early Culture. There is no place for him either in
Stoic or in Socialistic thought.
Thus the Faust of the First Part of the tragedy, the passionate
student of solitary midnights, is logically the progenitor of the Faust
of the Second Part and the new century, the type of a purely
practical, far-seeing, outward-directed activity. In him Goethe
presaged, psychologically, the whole future of West Europe. He is
Civilization in the place of Culture, external mechanism in place of
internal organism, intellect as the petrifact of extinct soul. As the
Faust of the beginning is to the Faust of the end, so the Hellene of
Pericles’s age is to the Roman of Cæsar’s.
So long as the man of a Culture that is approaching its fulfilment

still continues to live straight before him naturally and
unquestioningly, his life has a settled conduct. This is the instinctive
morale, which may disguise itself in a thousand controversial forms
but which he himself does not controvert, because he has it. As soon
as Life is fatigued, as soon as a man is put on to the artificial soil of
great cities—which are intellectual worlds to themselves—and needs
a theory in which suitably to present Life to himself, morale turns into
a problem. Culture-morale is that which a man has, Civilization-
morale that which he looks for. The one is too deep to be exhaustible
by logical means, the other is a function of logic. As late as Plato and
as late as Kant ethics are still mere dialectics, a game with concepts,
or the rounding-off of a metaphysical system, something that at
bottom would not be thought really necessary. The Categorical
Imperative is merely an abstract statement of what, for Kant, was not
in question at all. But with Zeno and with Schopenhauer this is no
longer so. It had become necessary to discover, to invent or to
squeeze into form, as a rule of being, that which was no longer
anchored in instinct; and at this point therefore begin the civilized
ethics that are no longer the reflection of Life but the reflection of
Knowledge upon Life. One feels that there is something artificial,
soulless, half-true in all these considered systems that fill the first
centuries of all the Civilizations. They are not those profound and
almost unearthly creations that are worthy to rank with the great arts.
All metaphysic of the high style, all pure intuition, vanishes before
the one need that has suddenly made itself felt, the need of a
practical morale for the governance of a Life that can no longer
govern itself. Up to Kant, up to Aristotle, up to the Yoga and Vedanta
doctrines, philosophy had been a sequence of grand world-systems
in which formal ethics occupied a very modest place. But now it
became “moral philosophy” with a metaphysic as background. The
enthusiasm of epistemology had to give way to hard practical needs.
Socialism, Stoicism and Buddhism are philosophies of this type.
To look at the world, no longer from the heights as Æschylus,
Plato, Dante and Goethe did, but from the standpoint of oppressive
actualities is to exchange the bird’s perspective for the frog’s. This
exchange is a fair measure of the fall from Culture to Civilization.
Every ethic is a formulation of a soul’s view of its destiny—heroic or
practical, grand or commonplace, manly or old-manly. I distinguish,
therefore, between a tragic and a plebeian morale. The tragic morale
of a Culture knows and grasps the heaviness of being, but it draws
therefrom the feeling of pride that enables the burden to be borne.
So Æschylus, Shakespeare, the thinkers of the Brahman philosophy
felt it; so Dante and German Catholicism. It is heard in the stern
battle-hymn of Lutheranism “Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott,” and it
echoes still in the Marseillaise. The plebeian morale of Epicurus and
the Stoa, the sects of Buddha’s day and the 19th Century made
rather battle-plans for the outmanœuvring of destiny. What Æschylus
did in grand, the Stoa did in little—no more fullness, but poverty,
coldness and emptiness of life—and all that Roman bigness
achieved was to intensify this same intellectual chill and void. And
there is the same relation between the ethical passion of the great
Baroque masters—Shakespeare, Bach, Kant, Goethe—the manly
will to inward mastery of natural things that it felt to be far below
itself, and modern Europe’s state-provision, humanity-ideals, world-
peace, “greatest happiness of greatest number,” etc., which express
the will to an outward clearance from the path of things that are on
the same level. This, no less than the other, is a manifestation of the
will-to-power, as against the Classical endurance of the inevitable,
but the fact remains that material bigness is not the same as
metaphysical majesty of achievement. The former lacks depth, lacks
that which former men had called God. The Faustian world-feeling of
deed, which had been efficient in every great man from the
Hohenstaufen and the Welf to Frederick the Great, Goethe and
Napoleon, smoothes itself down to a philosophy of work. Whether
such a philosophy attacks or defends work does not affect its inward
value. The Culture-idea of Deed and the Civilization-idea of Work are
related as the attitude of Æschylus’s Prometheus and that of
Diogenes. The one suffers and bears, the other lolls. It was deeds of
science that Galileo, Kepler and Newton performed, but it is scientific
work that the modern physicist carries out. And, in spite of all the
great words from Schopenhauer to Shaw, it is the plebeian morale of
every day and “sound human reason” that is the basis of all our
expositions and discussions of Life.
VI
Each Culture, further, has its own mode of spiritual extinction,

which is that which follows of necessity from its life as a whole. And
hence Buddhism, Stoicism and Socialism are morphologically
equivalent as end-phenomena.
For even Buddhism is such. Hitherto the deeper meaning of it has
always been misunderstood. It was not a Puritan movement like, for
instance, Islamism and Jansenism, not a Reformation as the
Dionysiac wave was for the Apollinian world, and, quite generally,
not a religion like the religions of the Vedas or the religion of the
Apostle Paul,[440] but a final and purely practical world-sentiment of
tired megalopolitans who had a closed-off Culture behind them and
no future before them. It was the basic feeling of the Indian
Civilization and as such both equivalent to and “contemporary” with
Stoicism and Socialism. The quintessence of this thoroughly worldly
and unmetaphysical thought is to be found in the famous sermon
near Benares, the Four Noble Truths that won the prince-philosopher
his first adherents.[441] Its roots lay in the rationalist-atheistic Sankhya
philosophy, the world-view of which it tacitly accepts, just as the
social ethic of the 19th Century comes from the Sensualism and
Materialism of the 18th and the Stoa (in spite of its superficial
exploitation of Heraclitus) is derived from Protagoras and the
Sophists. In each case it is the all-power of Reason that is the
starting-point from which to discuss morale, and religion (in the
sense of belief in anything metaphysical) does not enter into the
matter. Nothing could be more irreligious than these systems in their
original forms—and it is these, and not derivatives of them belonging
to later stages of the Civilizations, that concern us here.
Buddhism rejects all speculation about God and the cosmic
problems; only self and the conduct of actual life are important to it.
And it definitely did not recognize a soul. The standpoint of the
Indian psychologist of early Buddhism was that of the Western
psychologist and the Western “Socialist” of to-day, who reduce the
inward man to a bundle of sensations and an aggregation of
electrochemical energies. The teacher Nagasena tells King
Milinda[442] that the parts of the car in which he is journeying are not
the car itself, that “car” is only a word and that so also is the soul.
The spiritual elements are designated Skandhas, groups, and are
impermanent. Here is complete correspondence with the ideas of
association-psychology, and in fact the doctrines of Buddha contain
much materialism.[443] As the Stoic appropriated Heraclitus’s idea of
Logos and flattened it to a materialist sense, as the Socialism based
on Darwin has mechanicalized (with the aid of Hegel) Goethe’s deep
idea of development, so Buddhism treated the Brahman notion of
Karma, the idea (hardly achievable in our thought) of a being actively
completing itself. Often enough it regarded this quite materially as a
world-stuff under transformation.
What we have before us is three forms of Nihilism, using the word
in Nietzsche’s sense. In each case, the ideals of yesterday, the
religious and artistic and political forms that have grown up through
the centuries, are undone; yet even in this last act, this self-
repudiation, each several Culture employs the prime-symbol of its
whole existence. The Faustian nihilist—Ibsen or Nietzsche, Marx or
Wagner—shatters the ideals. The Apollinian—Epicurus or
Antisthenes or Zeno—watches them crumble before his eyes. And
the Indian withdraws from their presence into himself. Stoicism is
directed to individual self-management, to statuesque and purely
present being, without regard to future or past or neighbour.
Socialism is the dynamic treatment of the same theme; it is
defensive like Stoicism, but what it defends is not the pose but the
working-out of the life; and more, it is offensive-defensive, for with a
powerful thrust into distance it spreads itself into all future and over
all mankind, which shall be brought under one single regimen.
Buddhism, which only a mere dabbler in religious research could
compare with Christianity,[444] is hardly reproducible in words of the
Western languages. But it is permissible to speak of a Stoic Nirvana
and point to the figure of Diogenes, and even the notion of a
Socialist Nirvana has its justification in so far that European
weariness covers its flight from the struggle for existence under
catchwords of world-peace, Humanity and brotherhood of Man. Still,
none of this comes anywhere near the strange profundity of the
Buddhist conception of Nirvana. It would seem as though the soul of
an old Culture, when from its last refinements it is passing into death,
clings, as it were, jealously to the property that is most essentially its
own, to its form-content and the innate prime-symbol. There is
nothing in Buddhism that could be regarded as “Christian,” nothing in
Stoicism that is to be found in the Islam of A.D. 1000, nothing that
Confucius shares with Socialism. The phrase “si duo faciunt idem,
non est idem”—which ought to appear at the head of every historical
work that deals with living and uniquely-occurring Becomings and
not with logically, causally and numerically comprehensible Becomes
—is specially applicable to these final expressions of Culture-
movements. In all Civilizations being ceases to be suffused with soul
and comes to be suffused with intellect, but in each several
Civilization the intellect is of a particular structure and subject to the
form-language of a particular symbolism. And just because of all this
individualness of the Being which, working in the unconscious,
fashions the last-phase creations on the historical surface,
relationship of the instances to one another in point of historical
position becomes decisively important. What they bring to
expression is different in each case, but the fact that they bring it to
expression so marks them as “contemporary” with one another. The
Buddhistic abnegation of full resolute life has a Stoic flavour, the
Stoic abnegation of the same a Buddhistic flavour. Allusion has
already been made to the affinity between the Katharsis of the Attic
drama and the Nirvana-idea. One’s feeling is that ethical Socialism,
although a century has already been given to its development, has
not yet reached the clear hard resigned form of its own that it will
finally possess. Probably the next decades will impart to it the ripe
formulation that Chrysippus imparted to the Stoa. But even now
there is a look of the Stoa in Socialism, when it is that of the higher
order and the narrower appeal, when its tendency is the Roman-
Prussian and entirely unpopular tendency to self-discipline and self-
renunciation from sense of great duty; and a look of Buddhism in its
contempt for momentary ease and carpe diem. And, on the other
hand, it has unmistakably the Epicurean look in that mode of it which
alone makes it effective downward and outward as a popular ideal,
in which it is a hedonism (not indeed of each-for-himself, but) of
individuals in the name of all.
Every soul has religion, which is only another word for its
existence. All living forms in which it expresses itself—all arts,
doctrines, customs, all metaphysical and mathematical form-worlds,
all ornament, every column and verse and idea—are ultimately
religious, and must be so. But from the setting-in of Civilization they
cannot be so any longer. As the essence of every Culture is religion,
so—and consequently—the essence of every Civilization is irreligion
—the two words are synonymous. He who cannot feel this in the
creativeness of Manet as against Velasquez, of Wagner as against
Haydn, of Lysippus as against Phidias, of Theocritus as against
Pindar, knows not what the best means in art. Even Rococo in its
worldliest creations is still religious. But the buildings of Rome, even
when they are temples, are irreligious; the one touch of religious
architecture that there was in old Rome was the intrusive Magian-
souled Pantheon, first of the mosques. The megalopolis itself, as
against the old Culture-towns—Alexandria as against Athens, Paris
as against Bruges, Berlin as against Nürnberg—is irreligious[445]
down to the last detail, down to the look of the streets, the dry
intelligence of the faces.[446] And, correspondingly, the ethical
sentiments belonging to the form-language of the megalopolis are
irreligious and soulless also. Socialism is the Faustian world-feeling
become irreligious; “Christianity,” so called (and qualified even as
“true Christianity”), is always on the lips of the English Socialist, to
whom it seems to be something in the nature of a “dogma-less
morale.” Stoicism also was irreligious as compared with Orphic
religion, and Buddhism as compared with Vedic, and it is of no
importance whatever that the Roman Stoic approved and conformed
to Emperor-worship, that the later Buddhist sincerely denied his
atheism, or that the Socialist calls himself an earnest Freethinker or
even goes on believing in God.
It is this extinction of living inner religiousness, which gradually
tells upon even the most insignificant element in a man’s being, that
becomes phenomenal in the historical world-picture at the turn from
the Culture to the Civilization, the Climacteric of the Culture, as I
have already called it, the time of change in which a mankind loses
its spiritual fruitfulness for ever, and building takes the place of
begetting. Unfruitfulness—understanding the word in all its direct
seriousness—marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of
fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of historical
symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the extinction
of great art, of great courtesy, of great formal thought, of the great
style in all things, but also quite carnally in the childlessness and
“race-suicide” of the civilized and rootless strata, a phenomenon not
peculiar to ourselves but already observed and deplored—and of
course not remedied—in Imperial Rome and Imperial China.[447]
VII
As to the living representatives of these new and purely intellectual

creations, the men of the “New Order” upon whom every decline-
time founds such hopes, we cannot be in any doubt. They are the
fluid megalopolitan Populace, the rootless city-mass (οἱ πολλοί, as
Athens called it) that has replaced the People, the Culture-folk that
was sprung from the soil and peasantlike even when it lived in
towns. They are the market-place loungers of Alexandria and Rome,
the newspaper-readers of our own corresponding time; the
“educated” man who then and now makes a cult of intellectual
mediocrity and a church of advertisement;[448] the man of the theatres
and places of amusement, of sport and “best-sellers.” It is this late-
appearing mass and not “mankind” that is the object of Stoic and
Socialist propaganda, and one could match it with equivalent
phenomena in the Egyptian New Empire, Buddhist India and
Confucian China.
Correspondingly, there is a characteristic form of public effect, the
Diatribe.[449] First observed as a Hellenistic phenomenon, it is an
efficient form in all Civilizations. Dialectical, practical and plebeian
through and through, it replaces the old meaningful and far-ranging
Creation of the great man by the unrestrained Agitation of the small
and shrewd, ideas by aims, symbols by programs. The expansion-
element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of
outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also.
Quantity replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening. We must
not confuse this hurried and shallow activity with the Faustian will-to-
power. All it means is that creative inner life is at an end and
intellectual existence can only be kept up materially, by outward
effect in the space of the City. Diatribe belongs necessarily to the
“religion of the irreligious” and is the characteristic form that the “cure
of souls” takes therein. It appears as the Indian preaching, the
Classical rhetoric, and the Western journalism. It appeals not to the
best but to the most, and it values its means according to the
number of successes obtained by them. It substitutes for the old
thoughtfulness an intellectual male-prostitution by speech and
writing, which fills and dominates the halls and the market-places of
the megalopolis. As the whole of Hellenistic philosophy is rhetorical,
so the social-ethic system of Zola’s novel and Ibsen’s drama is
journalistic. If Christianity in its original expansion became involved
with this spiritual prostitution, it must not be confounded with it. The
essential point of Christian missionarism has almost always been
missed.[450] Primitive Christianity was a Magian religion and the soul
of its Founder was utterly incapable of this brutal activity without tact
or depth. And it was the Hellenistic practice of Paul[451] that—against
the determined opposition of the original community, as we all know
—introduced it into the noisy, urban, demagogic publicity of the
Imperium Romanum. Slight as his Hellenistic tincture may have
been, it sufficed to make him outwardly a part of the Classical
Civilization. Jesus had drawn unto himself fishermen and peasants,
Paul devoted himself to the market-places of the great cities and the
megalopolitan form of propaganda. The word “pagan” (man of the
heath or country-side) survives to this day to tell us who it was that
this propaganda affected last. What a difference, indeed what
diametrical opposition, between Paul and Boniface the passionate
Faustian of woods and lone valleys, the joyous cultivating
Cistercians, the Teutonic Knights of the Slavonic East! Here was
youth once more, blossoming and yearning in a peasant landscape,
and not until the 19th Century, when that landscape and all
pertaining to it had aged into a world based on the megalopolis and
inhabited by the masses, did Diatribe appear in it. A true peasantry
enters into the field of view of Socialism as little as it did into those of
Buddha and the Stoa. It is only now, in the Western megalopolis, that
the equivalent of the Paul-type emerges, to figure in Christian or anti-
Christian, social or theosophical “causes,” Free Thought or the
making of religious fancy-ware.
This decisive turn towards the one remaining kind of life—that is,
life as a fact, seen biologically and under causality-relations instead
of as Destiny—is particularly manifest in the ethical passion with
which men now turn to philosophies of digestion, nutrition and
hygiene. Alcohol-questions and Vegetarianism are treated with
religious earnestness—such, apparently, being the gravest problems
that the “men of the New Order,” the generations of frog-perspective,
are capable of tackling. Religions, as they are when they stand new-
born on the threshold of the new Culture—the Vedic, the Orphic, the
Christianity of Jesus and the Faustian Christianity of the old
Germany of chivalry—would have felt it degradation even to glance
at questions of this kind. Nowadays, one rises to them. Buddhism is
unthinkable without a bodily diet to match its spiritual diet, and
amongst the Sophists, in the circle of Antisthenes, in the Stoa and
amongst the Sceptics such questions became ever more and more
prominent. Even Aristotle wrote on the alcohol-question, and a whole
series of philosophers took up that of vegetarianism. And the only
difference between Apollinian and Faustian methods here is that the
Cynic theorized about his own digestion while Shaw treats of
“everybody’s.” The one disinterests himself, the other dictates. Even
Nietzsche, as we know, handled such questions with relish in his
Ecce Homo.
VIII
Let us, once more, review Socialism (independently of the
economic movement of the same name) as the Faustian example of
Civilization-ethics. Its friends regard it as the form of the future, its
enemies as a sign of downfall, and both are equally right. We are all
Socialists, wittingly or unwittingly, willingly or unwillingly. Even
resistance to it wears its form.
Similarly, and equally necessarily, all Classical men of the Late
period were Stoics unawares. The whole Roman people, as a body,
has a Stoic soul. The genuine Roman, the very man who fought
Stoicism hardest, was a Stoic of a stricter sort than ever a Greek
was. The Latin language of the last centuries before Christ was the
mightiest of Stoic creations.
Ethical Socialism is the maximum possible of attainment to a life-
feeling under the aspect of Aims;[452] for the directional movement of
Life that is felt as Time and Destiny, when it hardens, takes the form
of an intellectual machinery of means and end. Direction is the living,
aim the dead. The passionate energy of the advance is generically
Faustian, the mechanical remainder—“Progress”—is specifically
Socialistic, the two being related as body and skeleton. And of the
two it is the generic quality that distinguishes Socialism from
Buddhism and Stoicism; these, with their respective ideals of
Nirvana and Ataraxia, are no less mechanical in design than
Socialism is, but they know nothing of the latter’s dynamic energy of
expansion, of its will-to-infinity, of its passion of the third dimension.
In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism is not a
system of compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of
will-to-power. Any other reading of it is illusory. The aim is through
and through imperialist; welfare, but welfare in the expansive sense,
the welfare not of the diseased but of the energetic man who ought
to be given and must be given freedom to do, regardless of
obstacles of wealth, birth and tradition. Amongst us, sentimental
morale, morale directed to happiness and usefulness, is never the
final instinct, however we may persuade ourselves otherwise. The
head and front of moral modernity must ever be Kant, who (in this
respect Rousseau’s pupil) excludes from his ethics the motive of
Compassion and lays down the formula “Act, so that....” All ethic in
this style expresses and is meant to express the will-to-infinity, and
this will demands conquest of the moment, the present, and the
foreground of life. In place of the Socratic formula “Knowledge is
Virtue” we have, even in Bacon, the formula “Knowledge is Power.”
The Stoic takes the world as he finds it, but the Socialist wants to
organize and recast it in form and substance, to fill it with his own
spirit. The Stoic adapts himself, the Socialist commands. He would
have the whole world bear the form of his view, thus transferring the
idea of the “Critique of Pure Reason” into the ethical field. This is the
ultimate meaning of the Categorical Imperative, which he brings to
bear in political, social and economic matters alike—act as though
the maxims that you practise were to become by your will the law for
all. And this tyrannical tendency is not absent from even the
shallowest phenomena of the time.
It is not attitude and mien, but activity that is to be given form. As
in China and in Egypt, life only counts in so far as it is deed. And it is
the mechanicalizing of the organic concept of Deed that leads to the
concept of work as commonly understood, the civilised form of
Faustian effecting. This morale, the insistent tendency to give to Life
the most active forms imaginable, is stronger than reason, whose
moral programs—be they never so reverenced, inwardly believed or
ardently championed—are only effective in so far as they either lie,
or are mistakenly supposed to lie, in the direction of this force.
Otherwise they remain mere words. We have to distinguish, in all
modernism, between the popular side with its dolce far niente, its
solicitude for health, happiness, freedom from care, and universal
peace—in a word, its supposedly Christian ideals—and the higher
Ethos which values deeds only, which (like everything else that is
Faustian) is neither understood nor desired by the masses, which
grandly idealizes the Aim and therefore Work. If we would set
against the Roman “panem et circenses” (the final life-symbol of
Epicurean-Stoic existence, and, at bottom, of Indian existence also)
some corresponding symbol of the North (and of Old China and
Egypt) it would be the “Right to Work.” This was the basis of Fichte’s
thoroughly Prussian (and now European) conception of State-
Socialism, and in the last terrible stages of evolution it will culminate
in the Duty to Work.
Think, lastly, of the Napoleonic in it, the "ære perennius," the will-
to-duration. Apollinian man looked back to a Golden Age; this
relieved him of the trouble of thinking upon what was still to come.
The Socialist—the dying Faust of Part II—is the man of historical
care, who feels the Future as his task and aim, and accounts the
happiness of the moment as worthless in comparison. The Classical
spirit, with its oracles and its omens, wants only to know the future,
but the Westerner would shape it. The Third Kingdom is the
Germanic ideal. From Joachim of Floris to Nietzsche and Ibsen—
arrows of yearning to the other bank, as the Zarathustra says—every
great man has linked his life to an eternal morning. Alexander’s life
was a wondrous paroxysm, a dream which conjured up the Homeric
ages from the grave. Napoleon’s life was an immense toil, not for
himself nor for France, but for the Future.
It is well, at this point, to recall once more that each of the different
great Cultures has pictured world-history in its own special way.
Classical man only saw himself and his fortunes as statically present
with himself, and did not ask “whence” or “whither.” Universal history
was for him an impossible notion. This is the static way of looking at
history. Magian man sees it as the great cosmic drama of creation
and foundering, the struggle between Soul and Spirit, Good and Evil,
God and Devil—a strictly-defined happening with, as its culmination,
one single Peripeteia—the appearance of the Saviour. Faustian man
sees in history a tense unfolding towards an aim; its “ancient-
mediæval-modern” sequence is a dynamic image. He cannot picture
history to himself in any other way. This scheme of three parts is not
indeed world-history as such, general world-history. But it is the
image of world-history as it is conceived in the Faustian style. It
begins to be true and consistent with the beginning of the Western
Culture and ceases with its ceasing; and Socialism in the highest
sense is logically the crown of it, the form of its conclusive state that
has been implicit in it from Gothic onwards.
And here Socialism—in contrast to Stoicism and Buddhism—
becomes tragic. It is of the deepest significance that Nietzsche, so
completely clear and sure in dealing with what should be destroyed,
what transvalued, loses himself in nebulous generalities as soon as
he comes to discuss the Whither, the Aim. His criticism of decadence
is unanswerable, but his theory of the Superman is a castle in the air.
It is the same with Ibsen—“Brand” and “Rosmersholm,” “Emperor
and Galilean” and “Master-builder”—and with Hebbel, with Wagner
and with everyone else. And therein lies a deep necessity; for, from
Rousseau onwards, Faustian man has nothing more to hope for in
anything pertaining to the grand style of Life. Something has come to
an end. The Northern soul has exhausted its inner possibilities, and
of the dynamic force and insistence that had expressed itself in
world-historical visions of the future—visions of millennial scope—
nothing remains but the mere pressure, the passion yearning to
create, the form without the content. This soul was Will and nothing
but Will. It needed an aim for its Columbus-longing; it had to give its
inherent activity at least the illusion of a meaning and an object. And
so the keener critic will find a trace of Hjalmar Ekdal in all modernity,
even its highest phenomena. Ibsen called it the lie of life. There is
something of this lie in the entire intellect of the Western Civilization,
so far as this applies itself to the future of religion, of art or of
philosophy, to a social-ethical aim, a Third Kingdom. For deep down
beneath it all is the gloomy feeling, not to be repressed, that all this
hectic zeal is the effort of a soul that may not and cannot rest to
deceive itself. This is the tragic situation—the inversion of the Hamlet
motive—that produced Nietzsche’s strained conception of a “return,”
which nobody really believed but he himself clutched fast lest the
feeling of a mission should slip out of him. This Life’s lie is the
foundation of Bayreuth—which would be something whereas
Pergamum was something—and a thread of it runs through the
entire fabric of Socialism, political, economic and ethical, which
forces itself to ignore the annihilating seriousness of its own final
implications, so as to keep alive the illusion of the historical necessity
of its own existence.
IX
It remains, now, to say a word as to the morphology of a history of

philosophy.
There is no such thing as Philosophy “in itself.” Every Culture has
its own philosophy, which is a part of its total symbolic expression
and forms with its posing of problems and methods of thought an
intellectual ornamentation that is closely related to that of
architecture and the arts of form. From the high and distant
standpoint it matters very little what “truths” thinkers have managed
to formulate in words within their respective schools, for, here as in
every great art, it is the schools, conventions and repertory of forms
that are the basic elements. Infinitely more important than the
answers are the questions—the choice of them, the inner form of
them. For it is the particular way in which a macrocosm presents
itself to the understanding man of a particular Culture that
determines a priori the whole necessity of asking them, and the way
in which they are asked.
The Classical and the Faustian Cultures, and equally the Indian
and the Chinese, have each their proper ways of asking, and further,
in each case, all the great questions have been posed at the very
outset. There is no modern problem that the Gothic did not see and
bring into form, no Hellenistic problem that did not of necessity come
up for the old Orphic temple-teachings.
It is of no importance whether the subtilizing turn of mind
expresses itself here in oral tradition and there in books, whether
such books are personal creations of an “I” as they are amongst
ourselves or anonymous fluid masses of texts as in India, and
whether the result is a set of comprehensible systems or, as in
Egypt, glimpses of the last secrets are veiled in expressions of art
and ritual. Whatever the variations, the general course of
philosophies as organisms is the same. At the beginning of every
springtime period, philosophy, intimately related to great architecture
and religion, is the intellectual echo of a mighty metaphysical living,
and its task is to establish critically the sacred causality in the world-
image seen with the eye of faith.[453] The basic distinctions, not only
of science but also of philosophy, are dependent on, not divorced
from, the elements of the corresponding religion. In this springtime,
thinkers are, not merely in spirit but actually in status, priests. Such
were the Schoolmen and the Mystics of the Gothic and the Vedic as
of the Homeric[454] and the Early-Arabian[455] centuries. With the
setting-in of the Late period, and not earlier, philosophy becomes
urban and worldly, frees itself from subservience to religion and even
dares to make that religion itself the object of epistemological
criticism. The great theme of Brahman, Ionic and Baroque
philosophies is the problem of knowing. The urban spirit turns to look
at itself, in order to establish the proposition that there is no higher
judgment-seat of knowing beyond itself, and with that thought draws
nearer to higher mathematics and instead of priests we have men of
the world, statesmen and merchants and discoverers, tested in high
places and by high tasks, whose ideas about thought rest upon deep
experience of life. Of such are the series of great thinkers from
Thales to Protagoras and from Bacon to Hume, and the series of
pre-Confucian and pre-Buddha thinkers of whom we hardly know
more than the fact that they existed.
At the end of such series stand Kant and Aristotle,[456] and after
them there set in the Civilization-philosophies. In every Culture,
thought mounts to a climax, setting the questions at the outset and
answering them with ever-increasing force of intellectual expression
—and, as we have said before, ornamental significance—until
exhausted; and then it passes into a decline in which the problems of
knowing are in every respect stale repetitions of no significance.
There is a metaphysical period, originally of a religious and finally of
a rationalistic cast—in which thought and life still contain something
of chaos, an unexploited fund that enables them effectively to create
—and an ethical period in which life itself, now become
megalopolitan, appears to call for inquiry and has to turn the still
available remainder of philosophical creative-power on to its own
conduct and maintenance. In the one period life reveals itself, the
other has life as its object. The one is “theoretical” (contemplative) in
the grand sense, the other perforce practical. Even the Kantian
system is in its deepest characters contemplated in the first instance
and only afterwards logically and systematically formulated and
ordered.
We see this evidenced in Kant’s attitude to mathematics. No one is
a genuine metaphysician who has not penetrated into the form-world
of numbers, who has not lived them into himself as a symbolism.
And in fact it was the great thinkers of the Baroque who created the
analytical mathematic, and the same is true, mutatis mutandis, of the
great pre-Socratics and Plato. Descartes and Leibniz stand beside
Newton and Gauss, Pythagoras and Plato by Archytas and
Archimedes, at the summits of mathematical development. But
already in Kant the philosopher has become, as mathematician,
negligible. Kant no more penetrated to the last subtleties of the
Calculus as it stood in his own day than he absorbed the axiomatic
of Leibniz. The same may be said of Aristotle. And thenceforward
there is no philosopher who is counted as a mathematician. Fichte,
Hegel and the Romantics were entirely unmathematical, and so were
Zeno[457] and Epicurus. Schopenhauer in this field is weak to the
point of crudity, and of Nietzsche the less said the better. When the
form-world of numbers passed out of its ken, philosophy lost a great
convention, and since then it has lacked not only structural strength
but also what may be called the grand style of thinking.
Schopenhauer himself admitted that he was a hand-to-mouth thinker
(Gelegenheitsdenker).
With the decline of metaphysics, ethics has outgrown its status as
a subordinate element in abstract theory. Henceforth it is philosophy,
the other divisions being absorbed into it and practical living
becoming the centre of consideration. The passion of pure thought
sinks down. Metaphysics, mistress yesterday, is handmaid now; all it
is required to do is to provide a foundation for practical views. And
the foundation becomes more and more superfluous. It becomes the
custom to despise and mock at the metaphysical, the unpractical,
the philosophy of “stone for bread.” In Schopenhauer it is for the
sake of the fourth book that the first three exist at all. Kant merely
thought that it was the same with him; in reality, pure and not applied
reason is still his centre of creation. There is exactly the same
difference in Classical philosophy before and after Aristotle—on the
one hand, a grandly conceived Cosmos to which a formal ethic adds
almost nothing, and, on the other, ethics as such, as programme, as
necessity with a desultory ad hoc metaphysic for basis. And the
entire absence of logical scruple with which Nietzsche, for instance,
dashes off such theories makes no difference whatever to our
appreciation of his philosophy proper.
It is well known[458] that Schopenhauer did not proceed to
Pessimism from his metaphysic but, on the contrary, was led to
develop his system by the pessimism that fell upon him in his
seventeenth year. Shaw, a most significant witness, observes in his
“Quintessence of Ibsenism” that one may quite well accept
Schopenhauer’s philosophy and reject his metaphysics—therein
quite accurately discriminating between that which makes him the
first thinker of the new age and that which is included because an
obsolete tradition held it to be indispensable in a complete
philosophy. No one would undertake to divide Kant thus, and the
attempt would not succeed if it were made. But with Nietzsche one
has no difficulty in perceiving that his “philosophy” was through-and-
through an inner and very early experience, while he covered his
metaphysical requirements rapidly and often imperfectly by the aid of
a few books, and never managed to state even his ethical theory
with any exactitude. Just the same overlay of living seasonable
ethical thought on a stratum of metaphysics required by convention
(but in fact superfluous) is to be found in Epicurus and the Stoics.
We need have no doubt after this as to what is the essence of a
Civilization-philosophy.
Strict metaphysics has exhausted its possibilities. The world-city
has definitely overcome the land, and now its spirit fashions a theory
proper to itself, directed of necessity outward, soulless.
Henceforward, we might with some justice replace the word “soul” by
the word “brain.” And, since in the Western “brain” the will to power,
the tyrannical set towards the Future and purpose to organize
everybody and everything, demands practical expression, ethics, as
it loses touch more and more with its metaphysical past, steadily
assumes a social-ethical and social-economic character. The
philosophy of the present that starts from Hegel and Schopenhauer
is, so far as it represents the spirit of the age (which, e.g., Lotze and
Herbart do not), a critique of society.
The attention that the Stoic gave to his own body, the Westerner
devotes to the body social. It is not chance that Hegelian philosophy
has given rise to Socialism (Marx, Engels), to Anarchism (Stirner)
and to the problem-posing social drama (Hebbel). Socialism is
political economy converted into the ethical and, moreover, the
imperative mood. So long as a metaphysic existed (that is, till Kant)
political economy remained a science. But as soon as “philosophy”
became synonymous with practical ethics, it replaced mathematics
as the basis of thought about the world—hence the importance of
Cousin, Bentham, Comte, Mill and Spencer.
To choose his material at will is not given to the philosopher,
neither is the material of philosophy always and everywhere the
same. There are no eternal questions, but only questions arising out
of the feelings of a particular being and posed by it. Alles
Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis applies also to every genuine
philosophy as the intellectual expression of this being, as the
actualization of spiritual possibilities in a form-world of concepts,
judgments and thought-structures comprised in the living
phenomenon of its author. Any and every such philosophy is, from
the first word to the last, from its most abstract proposition to its most
telltale trait of personality, a thing-become, mirrored over from soul
into world, from the realm of freedom into that of necessity, from the
immediate-living into the dimensional-logical; and on that very
account it is mortal, and its life has prescribed rhythm and duration.
The choice of them, therefore, is subject to strict necessity. Each
epoch has its own, important for itself and for no other epoch. It is
the mark of the born philosopher that he sees his epoch and his
theme with a sure eye. Apart from this, there is nothing of any
importance in philosophical production—merely technical knowledge
and the industry requisite for the building up of systematic and
conceptual subtleties.
Consequently, the distinctive philosophy of the 19th Century is
only Ethics and social critique in the productive sense—nothing
more. And consequently, again, its most important representatives
(apart from actual practitioners) are the dramatists. They are the real
philosophers of Faustian activism, and compared with them not one
of the lecture-room philosophers and systematics counts at all. All
that these unimportant pedants have done for us is, so to write and
rewrite the history of philosophy (and what history!—collections of
dates and “results”) that no one to-day knows what the history of
philosophy is or what it might be.
Thanks to this, the deep organic unity in the thought of this epoch
has never yet been perceived. The essence of it, from the
philosophical point of view, can be precised by asking the question:
In how far is Shaw the pupil and fulfiller of Nietzsche? The question

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Q1 How Does Organisational Strategy Determine

Using Business Intelligence For Decision STUDY QUESTIONS 255

THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU 252 The SDLC Waterfall 274

Using Your Knowledge 276 CHAPTER 12

PART 4 REVIEW 334 Q3 How Can You Use Collaboration Tools to

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Relating This Text to Your Business Career

Why This Fourth Australian Edition?

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3 Improved coverage of Porter’s Five Forces and competitive strategy

3 New InClass Exercise: Competitive Strategy Over the Web

3 New Case Study: Competitive Advantage at National Australia Bank

4 New Collaboration Exercise: Microsoft PixelSense

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6 New InClass Exercise: What, Exactly, Does That Standard Mean?

6 New Guide: You Said What? About Me? In Class?

7 Updated chapter to take advantage of new content in Chapter 6

7 New case study: Renovate or detonate?

8 Entire chapter rewritten to focus on Social Media Information Systems

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9 New InClass Exercise: What Singularity Have We Wrought?

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10 Improved coverage of the role of prototyping

10 New Case Study: User Involvement at Northern Territory Asset Management

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