The Moving Finger: The use of Social Theory in WG 8.2 Conference Papers, 1975–1999

The remit of Working Group 8.2 (WG 8.2) is officially identified by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) as “the interaction of information systems and the organization” and its “Scope and Aims” statement (http://www.ifipwg82.org/) talks of “building theories about the role and impact of IT in specific organizational contexts.” Thus, while WG 8.2 may not be the only group of IS researchers concerned with understanding the relationship between social context and the development and use of information systems, for example, WG 8.1 (“Design and Evaluation of Information Systems”) and WG 9.1 (“Computers and Work”) may be expected to share similar interests, the Group would seem a potentially important forum for research that seeks to address the social dimension of IS. To the extent, moreover, that interest in social context may be seen to be characteristic of the concerns of interpretative research methods, the growing acceptance of such methods in mainstream journals such as MIS Quarterly could be seen to place WG 8.2 in the vanguard of the IS field.