The Relationship between IT and Organizations by Beniot Raymond from Laval University, Canada

Review of Theoretical Perspectives over Half a Century

Without being exhaustive, this study reviews important theoretical perspectives used by information system (IS) researchers to study the influence of information technology (IT) on organizations and their members in the last five decades. We illustrate these theoretical perspectives by selecting and describing exemplars published in each decade and explain their implications for researchers and practitioners. Our results show that in each of the last five decades, a new theoretical perspective was developed and adopted to extend the previous decade’s rhetoric by getting further away from technological determinism in the sixties and closer to more balanced causal arguments explaining the consequences of IT on organizations and their members. Our analysis suggests important implications such as the need for IS researchers to restore theoretical attention to material IT artifacts in IS research and potential approaches that can be used to achieve this goal.