Sociomateriality has been attracting growing attention in the Organization Studies and Information Systems literatures since 2007, with more than 140 journal articles now referring to the concept. Over 80 percent of these articles have been published since January 2011 and almost all cite the work of Orlikowski as the source of the concept. Only a few, however, address all of the notions that Orlikowski suggests are entailed in sociomateriality, namely materiality, inseparability, relationality, performativity, and practices, with many employing the concept quite selectively. The contribution of sociomateriality to these literatures is, therefore, still unclear. Drawing on evidence from an ongoing study of the adoption of a computer-based clinical information system in a hospital critical care unit, this paper explores whether the notions, individually and collectively, offer a distinctive and coherent account of the relationship between the social and the material that may be useful in Information Systems research. It is argued that if sociomateriality is to be more than simply a label for research employing a number of loosely related existing theoretical approaches, then studies employing the concept need to pay greater attention to the notions entailed in it and to differences in their interpretation.

The general assumption of consonance between belief and action in individual and organizational behaviour has meant that relatively little attention is paid in the organizational literature to how individuals and organizations respond to allegations of belief/act discrepancy. In this article we identify three forms of response to such allegations, self-deception, hypocrisy and scapegoating, and suggest how they may be interrelated. It is proposed that these responses may be seen as important means whereby individuals make sense of events and present their actions to others. The argument is developed and deployed with reference to the British `Arms to Iraq Affair', which was the subject of detailed scrutiny through an extensive public inquiry. The principal research contribution of our article is to problematize the issue of belief/act discrepancy in a way which invites the juxtaposition of sensemaking and impression management concepts.

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In this paper, we seek to explore the implications of the assumptions underlying interpretivism for the preferred relationship between the researcher and the research phenomenon. The growing interest in interpretive information systems research has drawn attention to the need to gain access to the interpretations of social actors. Various data-gathering methods are available to the researcher to achieve such access. These may be seen as located on a spectrum in terms of the degree of engagement between the researcher and the research subject. While engagement is not without its drawbacks from a research perspective, it may be argued that it enables good access to the sorts of data that interpretive researchers are seeking. Most of the research reported in the information systems (IS) field, however, has adopted relatively distant methods by which the researcher avoids intervention in the research context. Some of the characteristics of more engaged forms of research are illustrated through a discussion of a participant observation study of executive information systems development. This research has highlighted a number of issues that can be seen to be common to other data-gathering methods. Reasons for the neglect of engaged data-gathering methods are explored, and it is suggested that consideration of the issues it raises may contribute to more reflexive interpretive IS research practice.

Episodes of failure provide an interesting arena for the observation of alternative interpretations of organizational events. The social psychology literature suggests that individuals tend to attribute failure to external forces and that this may be due to selective perception, which may be motivated by the preservation of self-esteem and/or image enhancement. This paper discusses the differing narratives describing the failure of an information system in a UK hospital. It is suggested that these narratives may be seen as attributing failure to either the occurrence of particular events, or to the deliberate actions of specific groups or individuals. These are characterized as narratives of inevitability and conspiracy. Some possible reasons for the promotion of these alternative narratives are discussed.

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