Abstract
This paper is a piece of first-person auto-ethnographic writing that gives an overview of the author’s research career in the field of information systems covering the fifty-year time period from the middle of the 1960s to the middle of the 2010s with an emphasis on the early part of the time period. The story is about searching for larger contexts and/or bottlenecks when developing information systems and information systems development methods. The work described has included fieldwork (action research and field tests), headwork (connections to the literature) and textwork (writing books and articles).