Without being exhaustive, this study reviews important theoretical perspectives used by information system (IS) researchersto study the influence of information technology (IT) on organizations and their members in the last five decades. Weillustrate these theoretical perspectives by selecting and describing exemplars published in each decade and explain theirimplications for researchers and practitioners. Our results show that in each of the last five decades, a new theoreticalperspective was developed and adopted to extend the previous decade’s rhetoric by getting further away from technologicaldeterminism in the sixties and closer to more balanced causal arguments explaining the consequences of IT on organizationsand their members. Our analysis suggests important implications such as the need for IS researchers to restore theoreticalattention to material IT artifacts in IS research and potential approaches that can be used to achieve this goal