Disruptive digital innovations do not come without pain – the disorder that they introduce can create negative externalities and unintended consequences for people, communities, industries and economies. In the worst case, there is disruption with little innovation. This can lead to job losses for individuals, loss of human dignity, negative health impacts, lost revenue for communities, obsolescence of industries and loss of the traditional values that underpin modern societies.
Sarker et al. (2019) note that “humanistic concerns arising from the curtailing of human freedom and development, and from racism, sexism and commodification of the human body are overlooked for the apparent benefits that systems, including widely used search engines and medical databases, promise to deliver (Noble 2018; Wachter-Boettcher 2017). Indeed, there is a rising need for a thorough ethical interrogation of algorithms (O’Neil 2016) that underlie systems mediating many critical human activities, so as not to marginalize certain stakeholders, especially those ‘who are already in the margin’ (Noble 2018, p. 171).
In this special issue, we take this critical, yet constructive view of technological and social changes associated with “digital transformation” (Zuboff 2015, Wood et al. 2019, Larsson and Teigland 2020). We are interested in contrarian papers that reject the taken-for-granted assumptions of positive impacts of technology, as in cases of digital platforms, telework enabled by mobility, growth of the gig economy, fintech/blockchain, and so on, and investigate relatively unexamined platform externalities as a means to identify ways to resolve paradoxes, discontinuities and challenges posed by technology and the unintended consequences of technology applications.
We also seek papers that shed light on the problems of information technology (IT)-enabled phenomena such as the implications of winner-takes-all platform economics; highlight the social, environmental and economic implications of blockchain and similar innovative digital technologies; or propose solutions that mitigate negative societal impacts of innovation (e.g., through leveraging the power social networks to disseminate information and strengthen democratic discourse).
We encourage the submission of manuscripts taking either of two stances: 1) Submissions considering a critical or dystopian view of the social, technological and moral implications of digitization and digital transformation. Here, “the dark side” – ethical issues, unintended digitalization and other problematic aspects – of digitalization and platformization are front and centre the argument. An example may be Zuboff’s (2015, 2019) recent work on surveillance capitalism and her analyses of large-scale digitization “gone wrong”. 2) Submissions seeking to balance or reconcile “the dark side” and “the bright side” of digitalization and platformization. Here, analyses, exemplars and theoretical frameworks considered ethical issues and negative consequences explicitly, in addition to intended benefits of digitalization too often exclusively focused on. An example may be social media research: initial writings trumpeted the benefits of social media for building relationships, with later work highlighting problematic behaviours such as cyberbullying or doxxing.
In this special issue, we are open to all forms of inquiry, including surveys, experiments, case studies, design science projects and conceptual work that probe “the dark side”, ethical issues and unintended consequences of digitization, platformization and the rapid diffusion of digital infrastructures and digital work models based thereon.