Digital Responsibility: Social, Ethical, and Ecological Implications of IS

  • April 27, 2022
    Call for papers published


  • November 3, 2023
    Deadline for paper submissions


  • March 1, 2024
    First-round review decisions


  • May 1, 2024
    Hybrid Paper development workshop


  • July 11, 2024
    Deadline for submission of revised papers


  • October 1, 2024
    Second-round review decisions


  • December 8, 2024
    Deadline for submission of revised papers


  • February 1, 2025
    Provisional decision and final round of comments


  • February 27, 2025
    Deadline for submission of revised papers


  • March 1, 2025
    Notification of final decisions

Editors

  • Jan Recker, Universität Hamburg
  • Sutirtha Chatterjee, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
  • Janina Sundermeier, Freie Universität Berlin
  • Monideepa Tarafdar, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Description

Pervasive digitalization has influenced practically all aspects of the human experience and our institutions in business, society, and government. Diverse areas such as organizational management and strategy, urban affairs and city planning, healthcare, entertainment, safety, politics, and transportation have all been inexorably shaped by digital technologies. Such technologies have created non-trivial and non-reversible changes to our individual and collective behaviors, our institutions and organizations, as well as to human society and our planet at large. But with great power also comes great responsibility. The transformational changes from digitalization are neither unequivocally positive nor negative; more often than not, they are laden with ethical tensions between the contrasting outcomes they engender. For example, personal data digitalization can help individuals live longer and heal their lives, but it also challenges individual rights, obligations, and our sense of dignity. Social media allows us greater connectivity and access, upholding the democratic principle of collective voice, but also becomes a vehicle for manipulating public opinion and spreading fake news and falsehood. Emerging technologies such as shared electric vehicles are coining a revolution in the mobility and energy sector, but also increase fears of labor substitution. The datafication of everyday behaviors has led to new healthcare opportunities but also increased surveillance. The wide embracement of Artificial Intelligence (AI) propels new opportunities for automation and decision-making, but also raises thorny ethical issues in terms of accountability, privacy, fairness, discrimination, and further biases. These observations surface the fact that digital technologies invoke competing narratives: the transformational and innovative powers of digital technologies often contrast dysfunctional outcomes of digitalization, such as social endangerment or loss of human voice and autonomy. While digital technologies promise an exciting future, we have been cautioned that “the journey to the fully pervasive digitized world is also likely to be perilous” and “as much as the potential benefits of digital technology are real, so too are the risks and complexity that ride with them.” Therefore, the key question that we must ask is: how can we positively leverage the transformational powers of digital technologies without falling prey to their possible dysfunctional outcomes? We believe that the answer to this complex question partly lies in the consideration of an important construct: responsibility. Responsibility allows us to evaluate transformational digital technologies in a balanced manner, by factoring in both harmful and positive outcomes from the engagement with such artifacts. Responsibility has become a salient term in this digital age, inspiring new streams of research such as corporate digital responsibility and responsible innovation. Forcing us to engage in meta-ethical reflection, responsibility is crucial to addressing some of the dysfunctional outcomes associated with the rapid proliferation of digital technologies – thus allowing for normative action consistent with human values and ethical defensibility. As information systems researchers, it must be on us to better understand the concept of responsibility as it pertains to the enablement of positive outcomes of the ongoing digitalization of our everyday lives while safeguarding the human experience against possible negative consequences of the same. We term this concept “digital responsibility”, which we believe can serve as an organizing construct of research that aims to inform the balancing of ethical and humanistic tensions pertaining to the rapid proliferation of digital technologies. Notably, focusing on digital responsibility allows us to challenge the often-embraced utopic narrative of digitalization – thus problematizing our vision for this special issue. Digital responsibility is antithetical to “mindlessness” in designing and implementing digital technologies, which is often associated with the inability “to cope gracefully with changing, complex situations characteristic of high-risk domains.” The lens of digital responsibility necessitates that we embark upon rigorously analyzing, explaining, predicting, as well as influencing, the potential costs, duties, and obligations of decisions that relate to the development, implementation, and use of digital information and communication technologies. Following such observations, unpacking the phenomenon of “digital responsibility” should be of utmost concern to IS researchers – and this is the central theme of this special issue.

Potential topics

  • Designing and using digital technologies for and with responsibility
  • Considerations of accountability, liability, fairness, and/or responsibility for digital technology design, implementation, and use
  • Theoretical perspectives and/or empirical insights on the (un)intended social, ethical, and ecological consequences of digital technologies
  • Theoretical underpinnings of the concept of digital responsibility, such as from an ethical theory perspective
  • Design of digital technology to address social, ethical, and/or ecological challenges
  • Individual, organizational, institutional, or societal strategies for leveraging IS for social, ethical, and/or ecological challenges and innovations
  • The role of digital technology in promoting social, ethical, and ecological advancements
  • Applications of emerging digital technologies (e.g., AI) to social, ethical, and/or ecological realms
  • Societal, ethical, and ecological consequences of emerging digital technologies
  • (Un-)ethical issues of IS and the data they generate
  • Dignity, respect, and moral behavior in a digital world
  • Social support and inclusion enabled by or embodied in digital technologies
  • The balance of contradicting implications of IS (e.g., IS as a means for social change vs. IS for manipulating public opinion)
  • The affordances of existing and emerging digital technologies for enacting digital responsibility

Associate editors

Jose Benitez, EDHEC Business School
Alexander Benlian, TU Darmstadt
Roberta Bernardi, University of Bristol
Michelle Carter, Washington State University
Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic, University of New South Wales
John D'Arcy, University of Delaware
James Gaskin, Brigham Young University
Julia Kotlarsky, University of Auckland
Oliver Laasch, ESCP Business School
Shan Pan, University of New South Wales
Hannes Rothe, University of Duisburg-Essen
Saonee Sarker, Lund University
Olgerta Tona, University of Gothenburg
John Tripp, Clemson University
Tuure Tuunanen, University Jyväskylä