This paper explores the research question “How does digital delivery of services exclude marginalised groups, and what types of digital social exclusion occur?”. The aim of this grounded theory study was to understand the impacts of the rapid digitisation of services on communities with intermittent or poor digital connectivity. We conducted a qualitative study with 24 intermediaries who were helping digitally excluded people to gain access to services in two UK cities (London and Brighton) and one US city (New York). This research shows not only that digital exclusion is persisting, but that new forms of exclusion have emerged in which people are excluded through poverty, through being dependent on intermediaries to access digital services, by a lack of digital skills and through being forced to access poorly designed services. Drawing on these ideas and theories of social exclusion, adverse incorporation and marginalisation, our research findings suggest that digital exclusion is leading to new forms of exclusion that we conceptualise as “digital marginalisation”.

The broad aim of this interpretive study was to investigate the lived experiences of inter-organisational information system (IOIS) project members who worked in a 3-year-long IOIS project. The study presents an original longitudinal study of project member experiences. In this paper, we have described and analysed one core category, project power, which was derived from a grounded theory (GT) study. This study extends existing theories about power in organisational contexts, in particular the everyday use of power in projects. The paper shows how GT can be used to gain significant insights into a case study, and also generate new concepts. This paper gives detailed insights into the power issues as they played out in a complex IOIS project. This IOIS project spanned four user organisations, two suppliers, one national organisation, a research organisation and a government Ministry. One key finding is that, given the complexity of the project management structures in an IOIS project such as this, project members often resorted to formal authority as a means of getting things done, in the absence of informal links between organisations. The project history also had major ramifications on the use of power in this project.