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Despite discussions of the increasingly global character of information systems (IS), IS research remains highly “Western‐centric” both in terms of its subjects of study and the nationalities of the authors. Researchers interested in IS in non‐Western settings are thus reliant on a fragmented and not easily accessible literature that presents a potentially distorted picture of IS practice in these regions. This paper explores this situation through an examination of the literature relating to IS in Egypt (both directly, but also as a Middle Eastern, Arab or Islamic country). A macro analysis of these studies indicates that they are predominantly positivistic in epistemology, quantitative in methodology and focused on economic development and national culture. Although many of the studies make comparisons with other countries in the region, the explicit, or sometimes implicit, point of reference is almost invariably with “the West”. This is repeated in a detailed analysis of individual studies. Implications of these findings for research on IS in non‐Western settings are discussed.

This paper aims to contribute a personal account of doing critical research that uses the social theory of Pierre Bourdieu and also that takes a feminist approach to research. It aims to reflect on what this might mean in order to understand information systems and their uses at work and in everyday life.

The approach is confessional and describes the way in which critical qualitative research was undertaken in specific areas – that of call centres in Northwest England, gender and the UK ICT labour market and PhD research into issues of gender and home e‐shopping.

The findings as such suggest that social theory and critical approaches to research can contribute to understanding of IS at work and in everyday life. The account discusses the complexity of applying social theories and how difficult theoretical tomes are to understand, especially for the novice researcher.

The paper highlights the importance of hearing the silent or silenced voices and letting stories be told. A theme throughout is how theory is linked to practice.

The paper contributes to the special issue call for reflexive essays written in simple terms with details about how and why particular social theories or approaches were adopted. This will be of value to PhD and IS researchers whose work is informed by social theory.

This paper seeks to reflect on the importance of surprise in qualitative research on information‐technology initiatives. It also aims to consider how the use of social theory in the context of surprise can help to shape and guide field methods, data transformation, and substantive findings.

The discussion is personal and reflective. The paper considers the significance of surprise surrounding events within two of the authors' own research projects. It also reports on a perusal of the literature for explicit treatments of surprise.

Surprise in qualitative research is twofold. First, the research subjects experience surprise; indeed, surprise appears to be quite prevalent in IT‐related projects. Second, researchers too can be surprised in the course of their own work. Where these two kinds of surprise come together, one can find especially fruitful occasions for insight. In the authors' own projects, the element of surprise helped establish their respective commitments to actor‐network theory (ANT) as an effective approach for recognizing and understanding the crucial events in the emergence and evolution of information systems projects. Based on a literature search, the paper can add a third category of surprise to the first two: the authors' surprise at finding that surprise, despite its practical prevalence, remains largely unrecognized in information systems research.

The value of the paper lies in calling forth the element of surprise as an important kind of research event that deserves qualitative researchers' explicit attention. It also points toward the usefulness of social theory in systematizing the researcher's response to surprise.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a frank reflection on the authors' journey in applying social theory to understand the routine use of a transaction‐processing system in a rich field context.

Inspired by a perplexing initial observation, the program of research moved quickly from one of more traditional positivist methods (experiments and surveys) to case study research. The case study involved observation and comparative analysis of the routine use of a reservation system across a large franchised accommodation chain.

As a reflective essay, the key findings relate to the research process itself. The essence of the findings is that applying social theory is itself a social process.

The paper finds that insight can come from understanding the routine use of IT as a social artefact, not just from studying crises or latest innovations.

This paper sets out to examine the use of institutional theory in information systems research. It also seeks to consider recent debates within information systems, that the field should develop its own social theories. The purpose of the paper is to demonstrate that IS researchers need to engage more fully with the institutional theory literature as the body of work is conceptually rich and is more appropriately used to analyse and understand complex social phenomena.

Reviewing the institutionalist literature from the field of IS, the paper shows that most accounts engage in empirically testing institutionalist concepts, rather than analysing the richness of these concepts to further develop and build the theory.

The paper finds that most institutionalist accounts within information systems research adopt an organisational unit of analysis as opposed to a multi‐level approach which encompasses societal and individual levels. Research further shows more studies on the “effects” of institutionalism than on the “processual” accounts.

It is argued that information systems researchers need to become more aware of the wider debates within the institutional theory literature, particularly as the theory is conceptually ambiguous, yet not amenable to over‐simplification as a means to achieve methodological rigour.

The use of institutional theory offers practitioners conceptual tools and techniques for understanding complex change management scenarios relating to IS work.

The paper contributes to the IS literature through reviewing the range of studies using institutional theory. It illustrates the narrow use of the theory adopted by the IS community and suggests that a more fruitful approach is to use a wider multi‐level and multi‐method approach. The paper suggests that institutional theory offers a conceptually rich lens for analysing IS themes and issues and encourages further use of the theory for IS and management research.

This paper seeks to offer a retrospective look at an intellectual journey in and out of using actor‐network theory, which the author drew on to carry out an in‐depth case study of the troubled implementation of a computerised reservation system in a major transport company. The application of some key ANT concepts, i.e. human and non‐human actors, symmetry and translation, is reflected upon, highlighting their benefits and limitations.

The paper's aims are accomplished through a confessional account of how it was done, rather than a normative post hoc justification. Some empirical evidence is provided to illustrate the difficulties and problems encountered in travelling back and forth between theory, methodology and data.

In particular, ANT was very useful in focusing the paper on how to look at IS success and failure symmetrically and how social and technical distinctions are socially constructed, for instance in the conception and application of yield management software. Formulating a series of translations to encompass a large number of actors is shown to have provided some explanatory capacity. But a limitation is how to relate local and global actors, which is also a matter of power relations and politics.

The paper explains why, as a late and unplanned reaction to this, but also in contradiction with ANT principles, it ended up complementing ANT with Clegg's theory of power to bridge that gap. The paper concludes with a discussion of where the difficulties lie in using ANT and how it can be misused in IS research; the author argues that this is due to a lack of exposure to post‐structuralism in IS research, compared with other management‐related disciplines; and that recent efforts by scholars in the science and technology studies field to combine constructivist approaches such as ANT with critical social analysis should be considered.