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The changing role of technology in the virtual workplace has been accompanied by a proliferation of research activity focusing initially on the technical aspects and, more recently, on the social and political aspects of the diffusion process, including power and politics. This paper builds on the work of Kling and Markus on power and politics in IT, extending it to e‐mail and more specifically, to the use of e‐mail for petty tyranny. Reviews the literature on petty tyranny and its implications to IT and e‐mail. Presents a case study in which e‐mail was used by a department chair to manipulate, control, and coerce employees. The discussion links the events in the case with the literature on petty tyranny. In conclusion, demonstrates that e‐mail features make it amenable to political abuse and elaborates on the more general, theoretical, practical and ethical implications from this research.

Past research on electronic mail (e‐mail) has established this information technology as an effective means for achieving intra‐ and inter‐organizational co‐ordination. Current research on e‐mail has gone beyond the technical aspects of implementation to the non‐technical, namely, the social aspects. This paper follows the current trend by considering the role of leadership in diffusion and implementation of e‐mail. A case study which describes the introduction of e‐mail to a university community, is presented. The diffusion of e‐mail was strongly supported by the charismatic president of the university and was a technical success. It was, however, followed by a series of political events that undermined the leadership of the president. The discussion focuses on how leadership theories, paritcularly current theories on charismatic leadership, can explain the technical success of the project and its turbulent political side‐effects. The conclusions outline implications for managers and information systems practitioners.

This research seeks to investigate the introduction of new information and communication technology systems and to describe the development of a conceptual model of enterprise resource‐planning systems adoption based on the published rationales organizations use to justify their adoption.

The study uses a grounded theory approach to building the conceptual model from electronically distributed documents. These documents were selected from a sample of universities which adopted enterprise resource‐planning systems.

This paper reports on the use of grounded theory in the internet context. The study found that there were strong similarities between justifications and reported motives. The study noted that justifications concerning financial, work‐life and organisational‐mission issues were relatively minor.

This model is built on published justifications, which should not be confused with motives. This picture may distort reality by over‐emphasising some rationales and under‐representing others.

This paper may be of interest to researchers considering the use of grounded theory in their research project.

This paper describes how grounded theory was used to construct a model of the rationales for adopting enterprise resource‐planning systems from electronically sourced documents. The paper is of interest to researchers in information systems and those conducting grounded theory research on the internet.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the growth and development of periodical literature on Web 2.0 technologies and their other fields.

Bibliographic data of the articles published in the 13 leading peer‐reviewed journals are obtained from the Emerald database (www.emeraldinsight.com) directly using such keywords as “Web 2.0”, “blogs”, “wikis”, “RSS”, “social networking sites”, “podcasts”, “Mashup”, and multimedia sharing tools, i.e. YouTube and Flickr. The bibliographical surrogates such as author, title, subtitle, source, issue, volume, pages, etc. were recorded in MS‐Excel (2010) sheet for the analysis and interpretation of data. A bibliography of selected articles is provided.

The study found 206 research articles on the subject published in 13 leading library and information science journals of Emerald for period 2007‐2011. Further, the study found that 2009 was the most productive year with 69 articles. The study observed Online Information Review published 49 articles, and hence can be considered the core journal on the topic. Mike Thelwall from the UK was found to be the most prolific author, having authored or co‐authored five articles.

The study was based on 206 research articles published during the years 2007‐2011. The study was restricted to this period because the Web 2.0 concept was originated during 2004‐2005 and the undertaken period has sufficient published literature on the topic.

The paper provides reliable and authentic information on the subject. This is the first study on this topic.