Trust in technology, the title of this book, suggests a very broad theme, stressing the importance of the concept of trust in dealing with technology. The book concentrates on a particular kind of technology, however: software systems. The matter of the dependability of software systems is a much narrower topic than the title implies, but this topic is addressed in an interdisciplinary way. In this, the book is rather unique. The project on which the book is based is also quite unique.

The book could be seen as a midterm snapshot of a seven-year project on interdisciplinary research collaboration in dependability, where researchers from five British universities, coming from software engineering or sociology backgrounds, collaborated. The book is made up of ten chapters and an introduction, with the last chapter being a “postscriptum,” explaining the project as the context of the book. The remaining nine chapters discuss various research topics, including trust and organizational work, enterprise modeling based on responsibility, temporal features of dependability, and dependability and trust in organizational and domestic computer systems.

In chapter 7, an interesting attempt is made to introduce patterns for dependable design. Several chapters are based on case studies that present valuable material to analyze. There are other valuable points as well, but the book more generally discusses the dependability of a system as a whole. The dependability of a software system is examined via social and organizational issues, and viewed as a culturally and organizationally embedded matter.

The text has been carefully edited. This is not an easy task for a collection of contributions by different authors. Maintaining consistency in explicit definitions, or just in the meanings of various concepts, becomes a complex task to manage, and the task is made even more complicated by the interdisciplinary nature of the book, reflected by the diverse composition of the authors. Producing an index in this case becomes so complicated that often the idea is abandoned completely (and no index is included in this book). At an even more technical level, some of the acronyms and abbreviations in the text, and the extensive use of them, make the papers resemble technical reports rather than monograph chapters.

The book is volume 36 in the “Computer Supported Collaborative Work” series. The theme of the book is quite suitable for that series. The book comes close to being a scientific monograph, but, given that it is based on unfinished research, with the ultimate synthesis still to emerge, perhaps it would be better described as a collection of research works on a common theme. This is not an exact description, because the book is definitely more than that. In any case, the book is worth reading.