DeSanctis and Poole contribute to the organization sciences in two distinct ways. First, they insightfully probe and characterize the deep structures that exist within both the technological artifacts and the work environments within which these artifacts are applied (within the context of a given technology-group decision support systems). Second, they describe and illustrate innovative strategies for collecting data on these structures. In doing so, the authors have laid an extremely strong foundation for future scholarship exploring the "evolution-in-use" as well as the organizational impacts of advanced information technologies.

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Scholars hold different views about whether organizations consist of things or processes and about variance or process methods for conducting research. By combining these two dimensions, we develop a typology of four approaches for studying organizational change. Although the four approaches may be viewed as opposing or competing views, we see them as being complementary. Each approach focuses on different questions and provides a different — but partial — understanding of organizational change. We argue that coordinating the pluralistic insights from the four approaches provides a richer understanding of organization change than any one approach provides by itself.

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