This book uses case studies to show how and why eight social service organizations adopted computers.

Computerized information systems can be destructive or constructive for organizations and staff. However, the impact of a system cannot be predicted from its logical design alone: one must analyze how well the design fits the needs, interests, and existing practices of those who are likely to use it.

In Flows: A Network Approach to Social Inequality, sociologist Lorne Tepperman of the University of Toronto and co-author Sally Chiang propose an exciting new way of looking at the social world. Society, they suggest, is an enormously complicated, interrelated system of flows - flows of information, flows of people, and flows of capital, to name just a few. Through processes like diffusion and migration, manifested in everyday life through such phenomena as gossip, the formation of cliques, and the movement of people from one country to another, flows reshape the world we live in, determining...