Transactions

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are strongly implicated in the development and reshaping of modern institutions' work processes and increasingly mediate our experience of the world. Across many sectors, from financial services and utilities, through e-government to the music industry, electronic infrastructures are seen to facilitate functional integration and interdependence at a transactional level across a globalising economy.

This movement presents both practitioners and researchers with new challenges:

• How do innovations in transaction-handling change business processes and market models?
• How might we respond to new entrants exploiting digital transaction models?
• How do people cope, professionally and personally, in the face of such widespread change?

We analyse the role of ICT as a transactional technology used in markets and exchanges, grounding our work with empirical studies and within a broader context of social transformation and social discourses. We see that choosing whether to and how to modernise transactional activity is neither self-evident nor free of unanticipated consequences. Once set in motion transactional innovations have potential side effects that become irreversible as they are embedded and inscribed within day-to-day practices.

Our research programme in this petal reaches beyond the specific mechanisms and functional consequences of the processing of transactions to explore such activities as linked to their social, economic and political contexts. Research has considered such settings as global financial markets, health services, e-business and increasingly e-government.

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