ITR/PE The Impacts of IT on Individuals and Their Organizations: Conditions of Change and Transformation.

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

The basic theoretical and empirical foci are the social impacts of information and communications technologies, especially the wired and wireless Internet, on individuals' social and work lives in four institutional contexts-households, workplaces, governments, and schools - and on the four institutions themselves. The analyses are integrated by an interest in the ways in which ITs create "information networks" which enable individuals and work groups to engage in multiple functions from a particular contextual location and possibly to link these functions and these social institutions in novel ways. The project is grounded in the analysis of data gathered in field studies and in longitudinal surveys of more than 4,000 individuals in household, workplace and school samples from 16 localities distributed across the four U.S. regions. These systematic, empirical analyses will advance our scientific understanding of how IT use affects individuals across multiple roles within these networked institutions and will inform explanatory theories of IT-related change and transformation at the individual and organizational levels of analysis.