This call for a special issue in Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS) focuses on contemporary innovation in information infrastructures – especially the emergence of new technological capabilities such as block-chain, big data and Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies- and consequent emerging new (inter) organizational forms and processes encompassing contemporary infrastructuring.
The special issue builds on and expands the earlier stream of studies on information infrastructures (Monteiro et al. 2014) to garner a deeper understanding of the new, emerging forms of digitally enabled infrastructural formations and their design, growth patterns, and local, organizational, societal and institutional uses and impacts (Yeow et al, forthcoming). In particular, we encourage multi-level analyses, studies of infrastructures in heterogeneous contexts (developing economies; new industry contexts such as new financial services around cryptocurrencies), and so on. The studies are expected to give due consideration to both organizational and societal level relevance and significance, including double-edged effects that have often been missed in the past analyses of infrastructural formations.
These effects include but are not limited to changes in social justice, climate change, immigration, human or personal rights. Personalised technology infrastructures such as social media and smart phones have for example created novel societal problems that range from the accelerating mental health crisis among children and adolescents, growing anomie among social groups, threats to privacy and security, to the breakdown of consensual politics. At the same time, infrastructural solutions are being proposed to resolve many critical challenges of contemporary society including the rising cost of public services, responses to climate change, or creating engines of economic growth by providing personalized health care, optimized agriculture, or new ‘clean’ manufacturing systems.
More broadly, societal level information infrastructures play an increasingly central role across many spheres of social organizing and engineering including governance, health care, education and most public services, energy, commerce, culture and entertainment, and even cold and hot warfare between nations.
Whilst engaging with these empirical developments, research on contemporary topics such as AI, block-chain and IoT solutions increasingly adopt an infrastructural perspective. There is currently a worldwide shift of attention towards recent rapid technical developments and early adoption and use of AI solutions, which has stimulated diverse empirical studies of specific, local AI applications.
At the same time these studies struggle to analyze the broader context that makes such systems technologically and organizationally feasible and pushes organizations, industries and societies towards new AI based solutions. To address these questions requires the application of an infrastructural perspective which opens up under-theorised aspects of AI enabling such applications, such as digital data governance and digital storage and processing power, which all have become infrastructural.
Such analyses must go beyond portrayals of AI as discrete “things” with ‘effects’: a self-contained algorithm, or a singular application. Rather, from an infrastructural perspective AI should be treated as a comprehensive and evolving assemblage of heterogeneous technological and social elements (models, parameterization, optimization, training data) and their ever-expanding relationships. On top of this, AI is shaping and is shaped by communities of practices, one of the main tenets of infrastructural studies (Star and Ruhleder 1996; Hanseth et al. 1996)).
We invite original papers that engage with, scrutinize and highlight contemporary developments in a world composed of increasingly pervasive and rapidly changing information infrastructures and their component systems integrated into daily routines and widely shared services provided across time and space.
We appreciate generally any analytic work that mobilises and resonates with the broad aims and approach outlined above in novel, interesting ways, and explores empirically and/or theoretically the landscape and manifestations of ongoing digitalization and expansion of infrastructures within the contemporary society. The expected contributions are not confined to any particular 'school' or position of infrastructure studies and can take any feasible theoretical and methodological stance towards the subject matter.
Our scope is highly inclusive: we wish to recruit all scholarly work showing an interest in building upon, extending, or modifying current streams of work focused on information infrastructures.