Purpose -To provide a view of Rob Kling's contribution to socio-technical studies of work. Design/methodology/approach -The five "big ideas" discussed are signature themes in Kling's own work in the informatics domain, and of his intellectual legacy. Findings -This paper conveys something of Kling's presence in social informatics (SI) thinking by focusing on a number of "big" ideas -"multiple points of view", "social choices", "the production lattice" (and its corollary, the problematization of the user), "socio-technical interaction networks", and "institutional truth regimes". Research limitations/implications -A growing research community has demonstrated the power of SI techniques. It is essential that this body of work is sustained and developed, demonstrating how to undertake investigation and observation, that is not driven by instrumentalism but is informed by and leads to "technological realism". Practical implications -The SI corpus, exposing the dangers of naïve instrumentalism as an approach to information systems design and management, can guide practitioners on how to unpack the history of what is in view. This may be a specific technology, a social formation, or a sociotechnical circumstance. Practitioners may draw on the concepts presented, not as a prescriptive toolkit, but rather as a sensitizing frame to assist those who wish to re-vision the workplace. Originality/value -Central to the successful utilisation of computers in work, we argue, is the continuing development of a portfolio of interpretive concepts (such as STINs, regimes of truth, production lattices) that can consolidate Rob Kling's "big" ideas that are the core of this paper.

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Abstract. The authors present a framework for e-government research that draws heavily on Iacono and Kling's work on computerization movements. They build on this work by appropriating cognate studies of organizational informatics by Kling and his colleagues, and socio-technical research in the UK. From this blend, they derive a construct, the 'ideology-artefact complex'. Using empirical work (including recent case studies of their own), they indicate how this may inform e-government research. They discuss ways in which the construct may act as a bridge between two traditions of UWEuropean social informatics and US socio-technical research. They discuss a potential research agenda for computerization movements in egovernment that focuses on three main problem areas: macro level social order, counter-movements and material realisation.

The chapter presents a case study of new technology in a rapid response social work unit that is part of an e-government program in a Scottish municipality. The objective of the project was to improve the configuration and delivery of resources for housebound clients, and it was construed as a simple knowledge integration exercise by senior management. Taking a social informatics perspective, the authors interpret the case in terms of competing discourses or multiple versions of KM, and suggest that KM versioning is a characteristic, but underexplored, feature of complex projects that involve multiple actors with different knowledge trajectories.