Abstract.The purpose of this paper is to show that a number of basic issues have not been adequately addressed in existing office information systems research. Prominent among these are the nature and role of offices, the goals of office information systems development, and the nature of its organizational and managerial consequences. It is proposed that office information systems should be analysed as social action systems the behaviour of which is strongly affected by socially determined forces and constraints such as the behaviour‐channelling influences of authority, norms, customs, habits and precedence. Four types of social action are discussed: instrumental, strategic, communicative and discursive. Three contexts for perceiving and analysing the effects of social action in offices are introduced: technology, language and organization. Office information systems changes affect elements and relationships in these three contexts in different ways. By cross‐relating social action types and contexts, nine classes of object systems are identified. Each object system class implies a different category of effectiveness concerns which in turn implies different office information system design requirements. The paper notes that the existing research literature has primarily been concerned with only three of the nine object systems. For more effective office information systems development, however, the other systems also need to be considered. The paper concludes by exploring how this may be d