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Reports on a study which utilized responses from 442 employees working in 23 different Saudi organizations to assess stress levels and their differences with respect to nationality (Saudis, Arabs, Asians and Westerners), age, tenure, type of organization (public, semi‐private, private), and organizational size (small, medium, large). The findings suggest that: the main source of stress for employees working in private organizations is the lack of knowledge about their performance evaluation results, while this is not the case for employees working in public organizations; Saudi employees have the highest levels of stress, with Arabs second, Asians third, while Westerners (Europeans and North Americans) registered the lowest levels of stress; employees who are less than 30 years old experience the highest levels of stress; employees with six‐to‐ten years of experience show the highest levels of stress; and there is a significant inverse relationship between educational level and stress level.

The authors explore the nature of commitment, job satisfaction and job characteristics, and the nature of the interrelationships among these variables concerning expatriate employees in Saudi Arabia. An examination of a sample of 504 expatriate employees reveals that these employees are, by and large, indifferent with respect to their perceptions of commitment, job satisfaction, and job characteristics. In addition, the results provide strong support for (1) the influence of job satisfaction on commitment, (2) the influence of job variety on commitment, and (3) the influence of job autonomy, identity, and feedback on job satisfaction.

Despite discussions of the increasingly global character of information systems (IS), IS research remains highly “Western‐centric” both in terms of its subjects of study and the nationalities of the authors. Researchers interested in IS in non‐Western settings are thus reliant on a fragmented and not easily accessible literature that presents a potentially distorted picture of IS practice in these regions. This paper explores this situation through an examination of the literature relating to IS in Egypt (both directly, but also as a Middle Eastern, Arab or Islamic country). A macro analysis of these studies indicates that they are predominantly positivistic in epistemology, quantitative in methodology and focused on economic development and national culture. Although many of the studies make comparisons with other countries in the region, the explicit, or sometimes implicit, point of reference is almost invariably with “the West”. This is repeated in a detailed analysis of individual studies. Implications of these findings for research on IS in non‐Western settings are discussed.