Book excerpt: This book is concerned with the ways in which organizations design, build and use information technology systems. In particular it looks at the interaction between these IT-centred activities and the broader management processes within organizations. The authors adopt a critical social science perspective on these issues, and are primarily concerned with advancing theoretical debates on how best to understand the related processes of technological and organizational change. To this end, the book examines and deploys recent work on power/knowledge, actor-network theory and critical organization theory. The result is an account of the nature and significance of information systems in organizations which is an alternative perspective to pragmatic and recipe-based approaches to this topic which dominate much contemporary management literature on IT.