5. Key Readings

There are several collections that provide useful and wide-ranging introductions to the field (though no one of these is sufficient by itself). In particular we recommend:

• John Armitage and Joanne Roberts (eds) (2002) Living With Cyberspace: Technology & Society in the 21st Century London: The Athlone Press

• K Ducatel (ed.) Employment and Technical Change in Europe Aldershot, Edward Elgar, 1994

• Alistair Duff, 2000, Information Society Studies London: Routledge

• W Dutton (ed.) Information and Communications Technologies: Visions and Realities Oxford, Oxford University Press

• N Heap, R Thomas, G Einon, R Mason, H Mackay (eds.) 1995, Information Technology and Society London, Sage

• OECD, 1996, Employment and Growth in the Knowledge-based Economy Paris OECD, (various relevant documents are on the OECD websites at http://www.oecd.org, http://caliban.sourceoecd.org/vl=2937619/cl=24/nw=1/rpsv/home.htm )

Plus such websites as:

• http://srsweb.nsf.gov/it_site/html/rm_main.htm

• http://www.oii.ox.ac.uk/

There are also some valuable research programmes that have published a good deal of material online. The first two are fairly wide-ranging social science; the others focus more on specific issues.

• Virtual society: http://virtualsociety.sbs.ox.ac.uk/intro.htm

• E-Society http://www.london.edu/e-society/

• FISTERA http://fistera.jrc.es/

• JANUS http://www.janus-eu.org/Temp2/index-f.htm

• MUTEIS http://muteis.infonomics.nl/ (I found this a poorly organised site, though the content is interesting. A good way into this is via http://muteis.infonomics.nl/?q=filestore2 )

• RISESI http://www.risesi.org/

• SEAMATE http://www.seamate.net/

This is a mainly UK/EU list – perhaps you can locate good sites in other regions. It’s also worth checking out what the big international organisations have to offer in the area: look for instance at OECD, ILO, EUROPA and several UN sites. Downloadable papers will be put on WebCT.

There is a huge number of relevant journals, e.g. The Information Society and various journals on innovation, futures and science and technology policy themes, as well as specialised IT, new media, information science and related journals.