The project was initiated by the Department of Information Systems at the London School of Economics and Political Science, though the contributors are from other institutions as well, and in the social sciences as well as information science. They describe and analyze the current status of the study of information and communication technology by social scientists. Within sections on foundations, theories at work, and substantive issues and applications, the 13 studies explore encountering information systems as a phenomenon, an ecology of distributed knowledge work, actor network theory and cultural aspects of interpretive studies, reconstructing information systems evaluation, socially self-destructing systems, and other topics.