The research programme studies how organizations, which are immersed in information-rich environments, adapt their working and managerial practices (tasks, routines and procedures) and structures to respond to the information growth. The focus is on four settings: Wikipedia, the BBC, Europeana project (a.k.a. European Digital Library - EDL) and the adoption of Skype in corporate environments. Each case will focus on how the organizations studied manage information and, in doing so, contribute to the phenomenon of information growth.

The case studies seek to explore and document how information growth is associated with:

1. The gradual establishment of a socio-economic environment against which information-based services and operations become increasingly important.

2. The configuration of organizational routines, tasks and practices, which are associated with the expanding involvement of information, as well as the systems, applications and hardware technologies by which these tasks and routines are supported.

3. The emergence of new organizational arrangements and structures that seek to accommodate or take advantage of information growth.

4. The collaborative practices organizations develop in their effort to deal with an environment of intense boundary crossing and power dispersal.

Each of the four settings represents a distinctive instrumental and institutional context that is expected to contribute to the understanding of the case-specific dynamics underlying the contexts of the organizations or projects studied. The research programme is additionally concerned with advancing general propositions through cross-case comparisons.

The proposed approach differs significantly from previous studies that treat information mainly as an unproblematic resource, ignoring how its impressive diffusion and involvement in economic life alters the environment within which organizations currently operate. It pays specific attention to the self-propelling or reflexive mechanisms of information growth by means of which most strategies of information, ordering, reduction and management generate themselves new information.

Methodologically, the research programme represents a shift from analysing information growth from a predominantly quantitative, and largely descriptive, perspective (e.g. number of servers or electronic appliances or data measured in bytes) to a contextually sensitive, explanatory approach that has the potential of discovering the distinctive causal mechanisms that shape contemporary organizations and their environments.