There are increasing calls emerging from various fields of interest for broadening society’s understanding of technology, moving away from purely technical terms to one that is underpinned in a human context. However, any new ways of understanding are often driven by the specifics of the individual field formulating the new way of understanding, leading to fragmentation. This paper provides an integrated framework for understanding technology in a way that transcends disciplines. The new approach is underpinned in Dooyeweerd’s philosophy. The paper first gives an overview of the philosophy, which is then used to discuss a conceptual framework for a richer and non-reductionist relationship between Society and Technology.

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The role of Chief Information Officer (CIO) is emerging and evolving. This paper presents the results of conducting in-depth qualitative interviews with currently practicing CIOs. The approach taken in the interviews allowed for flexibility within each interview while promoting consistency across a number of interviews. Further, this approach facilitated the designation of management issues related to the CIO role at the unit and corporate levels as well as information technology related issues. Strategic issues were also identified relating to industry, culture, and alignment. It is necessary for both the CIO and senior management to understand and agree on role expectations and interpretations.

Analysis of more than 20 projects for clustering small and medium enterprises and supporting organizations in different Latin American countries has uncovered a number of barriers, activities, structures, strategies, policies and procedures that impact competitiveness. These factors mean that there are different appropriate industrial cluster and industrial business models appropriate for the social, economic, and business conditions of the Latin American region. It is difficult to transfer successful practices from industrialized countries to developing regions with a light adaptation, because it is impossible to have “clustering readiness” when resources are scarce, regional and industrial conditions are hostile, and associated capabilities of the participants of clustering are poor or nonexistent. These conclusions are supported by applying a methodology designed by the authors to identify global opportunities and formulate viable cluster structures, capable of converting isolated scarce resources in difficult situations, into world-class regional value propositions.

This paper addresses the continuing convergence and integration of digital electronic media, and in particular, virtual reality as an exemplar phenomenal media. The author explores and further develops the theme that each of such media entails a specific lexicon or language of use that continually evolves. For this media to be effective, however, it must be widely understood within its community of practice. In this paper, virtual reality is discussed as an exemplar new-media application as a means of virtual representation or reflection of events or behaviours in the real world from a socio-technical perspective.

The concept of using future innovation to achieve “right to market” (R2M) (Koudal &amp; Coleman, 2005) is the focus of this paper. This paper discusses the relationship between entrepreneurship and innovation and posits that they form a system where innovation is optimised when these capabilities are closely linked. The authors contend that innovation activities are best ‘managed’ by an organization’s entrepreneur(s) and that part of this role is to identify Innovation Champions and facilitate their innovation-related activities. The authors also explore the social and community interaction necessary for innovation to flourish and explain the role of entrepreneurs in forming Communities of Innovation (CoInv) based on innovation champions and their networks. This paper argues that CoInv are essential to ensure that each separate innovation has commercial potential and is operationally accepted with support diffused throughout the organisation. The authors demonstrate these assertions through a case discussion and conclude with some final comments on the future of this research.

In this article, the author investigates the nature of complexity and its role in project failure. Also, the paper proposes a model to assess complexity. It draws some conclusions about the implications for change management interventions. The author finds that projects fail when the complexity exceeds the capability of the organisation to cope. The overall aim of the article is to offer an approach to reducing this number of failed change projects.

This article addresses the institutional scaling of information systems through the interplay of globally distributed free and open source software development with organizational processes. Through examining various phases of a long term project to implement information systems for the public health care sector in resource-poor countries, we highlight changing sources of acceptance and legitimation. The analysis centers on the balance between local and global levels, from pilot sites, through an emerging broader organizational field, to increasingly involving national level institutional settings. In parallel to the established view of the scaling of ICT implementations as relating to complexity and risk in the form of unintended side-effects of the growth of a system, the authors highlight the qualitative switch between regulatory contexts. Shifting relations to local institutions means that scalability requires actors to interact with quite different organizational cultures, accountabilities and communicative practices.