Steve Sawyer's research interests focus on two main areas:

The take up and uses of computing by knowledge workers.

I focus on issues with the uneven take up, use and value derived from computerization efforts. This stream of empirical work and theorizing draws on studies of software developers, enterprise systems implementers, and knowledge-intensive professional work such as real estate agents, police officers and intelligence analysts.

Institutional change and computerization.

My interests are in the interactions among institutional structures and computing architectures. I am drawn to the events and actions that characterize these interactions found in the design, deployment and uses of computer-based systems. I have focused on specific organizational settings such as software development organizations, the residential real estate industry, and public sector organizations such as those involved in criminal justice and enterprise computing activities. My work spans both large and small enterprises, with a focus on inter-organizational interactions and the relationships among people, their uses of computing, and governance structures.

In doing this research I have focused on theorizing on the socio-technical nature of computing, an area of scholarship that is coming to be known as social informatics. Scholars engaged in doing social informatics are focusing on developing analytic techniques and amassing common findings as means to debunk the commonly held but naive views that computing has (1) direct effects and (2) that these effects are typically positive and as expected. In debunking this overly-simplistic view of computing I and colleagues focus on developing theories, analytic approaches, and common findings that reflect the more nuanced, socio-technical, situated and indeterminate nature of computerization.

This leads to where my research efforts get directed towards two audiences:

The first audience is the organizational decision makers, policy analysts, and thought leaders (some of whom are academics, some of whom are not) involved in policy, technology, and organizational decisions that link ICT uses with work and organizations. My work tends to be critical of the common, normative, models of ICT effects.

The second audience is other scholars of computing. Here my energies are divided in two parts. First, to influence research via findings and theory development. In doing this I argue, as noted above, that techno-centric views of individuals with unfettered agency engaging in the take-up and use of computing are both too common and too naive. And, that we as scholars must get beyond individualistic and direct-effects models of computing. My second effort is to engage computing education to include socio-technical analyses, social informatics principles, and the socio-technical perspective as the center of any viable IT education.