ISJ Editorial

This special issue of Information Systems Journal on Social Inclusion in the Information Systems Field was motivated by our desire to help the IS field to develop a greater understanding about aspects of human diversity in relation to the development, deployment, management, use, and impact of information systems and technologies. Consistent with a focus on human diversity, we were also interested in methodological diversity. Hence, we encouraged the submission of both quantitative and qualitative papers. We also requested papers representing positivist, interpretive, and critical epistemologies. Finally, we were interested in the use and extension of existing theories as well as the development of new ones. Our intention was to highlight rigorous IS research and theorizing about social inclusion in the information systems field. This, in turn, would support the larger goal of producing research that will contribute to a better understanding of the causes, manifestations and impacts of social exclusion, and subsequent interventions. Information Systems Journal is an appropriate venue for the publication of social inclusion research. We three special issue editors have all held editorial roles at ISJ. Eileen Trauth has served as Editor‐in‐Chief, K.D. Joshi has served as Senior Editor, and Lynette Kvasny has served as Associate Editor. ISJ also has a history of publishing social inclusion research, both through individual papers (eg, Quesenberry & Trauth, 2012; Windeler & Riemenschneider, 2016) and through special issues—such as the Special Issue on Women and IT (Von Hellens, Trauth, & Fisher, 2012). The process of producing this special began in 2015 with the call for papers. This was followed by a post‐ International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) workshop in 2015 on conducting social inclusion research that was offered by Association for Information Systems SIG Social Inclusion. Prospective authors were encouraged to participate in this workshop and to engage with the special issue editors. In July 2016, we received 21 manuscripts to review. First round decisions were made in February 2017. Following the peer review process, four manuscripts were selected for publication, representing a 19% acceptance rate. Final versions of these manuscripts were accepted in December 2017 and January 2018. We editors would like to thank the reviewers who gave generously of their time to review the manuscripts and provide developmental feedback. Without their efforts, this special issue would not have been possible. The notions of exclusion and inclusion are currently in the zeitgeist of the information systems profession. But there have been IS scholars working in this area for some time now. Indeed, this special issue builds upon and contributes to a substantial body of work—individual papers, special issues of journals, and conferences—that has preceded it. In this editorial, we draw upon that history to provide some context about the evolution and scope of social inclusion research at the time that this special issue of Information Systems Journal is published. Our intention is to help the reader to situate and better understand the work presented here. Additionally, to help prospective scholars interested in conducting such research, we offer some thoughts about new frontiers of social inclusion in IS research. Social inclusion research in the information systems field began to be published at the end of the 20th century but came into its own in the 21st. In their introduction to the proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP), Working Group 8.2, Trauth and Howcroft (2006, p. 3) address the question of why social inclusion was an important theme to explore in 2006. Their overall answer was that it was time to expand the boundaries of IS research beyond organizational and managerial impact to include societal influences as well. Their specific answer was that the 21st century has provided ample evidence of societal