Research in JSIS and the wider information systems (IS) field has increasingly shifted attention from strategy as an organisational outcome towards strategizing as distributed, communicative, and technology-mediated work. This shift has brought greater focus to technologies-in-use, the situated accomplishment of strategy work, and the changing roles of the actors involved in it (Peppard et al., 2014; Whittington, 2014; Marabelli & Galliers, 2017; Teubner & Stockhinger, 2020; Kleine et al., 2026). It has also prompted closer engagement between IS strategy and strategy as practice and process research, including work on how technologies carry, mediate, and condition strategizing over time (e.g., Henfridsson & Lind, 2014; Chanias et al., 2019; Baptista et al., 2021; Dias et al., 2023). Building on these developments, research on digital strategizing has shown that a recognisable domain has emerged around the role of digital technologies in processes that form, transmit, implement, host, and support strategy (Morton et al., 2022).
This special issue takes the next step by focusing on emerging forms and underexplored contexts of digital strategizing. A focus on emerging forms captures new ways in which strategizing is enacted through digital technologies and, in turn, how such technologies reshape the practices, routines, infrastructures, and organising forms involved. Emerging forms of digital strategizing include AI-supported strategizing, coordination through dashboards and digital infrastructures, digitally mediated participation, multimodal digital strategic communication, visibility and transparency dynamics in strategy processes, and platform- or ecosystem-based collaboration. These emerging forms encompass shifts in routines, cognitive frames, and organising forms, including multiagent arrangements, redefined organisational boundaries, and decentralised forms of organising. They also draw attention to new and underexamined practitioners, roles, and governance arrangements in strategizing, including actors such as Chief Digital Officers (CDOs), Chief AI Officers (CAIOs), platform leaders, and other human and AI-enabled actors whose growing influence remains insufficiently examined. A focus on underexplored contexts, by contrast, concerns the widening range of settings in which these emerging forms unfold. These include geopolitical environments, indigenous settings, public, third-sector, and hybrid organisations, online communities, and other organisational or geographical contexts beyond dominant Western and/or corporate perspectives. This focus reflects a broader movement in IS and strategy research towards understanding how strategizing is being extended and reconfigured through technological acceleration and emerging sites of practice (Burgelman et al., 2018; Davison & Andrade, 2018; Volberda et al., 2021; Jarzabkowski et al., 2025). Together, these themes challenge researchers to investigate emerging forms of digital strategizing rigorously, to widen research horizons to underexplored contexts, and to examine the interplay between the two.
Digital strategizing challenges existing knowledge because strategy is not only spoken and written, but also encoded and enforced through technologies and digital infrastructures. It introduces non-human and AI-enabled participants into strategy work: systems that can generate recommendations, foreground or foreclose options, and shape what becomes strategically legible while raising new questions about agency, accountability, and judgement in strategizing. A key challenge therefore goes beyond showing that digital technologies are central to strategizing in organisations today, and involves examining how they reconfigure the conditions under which strategizing takes place. For example, AI can broaden organisational attention, create new affordances for strategic work, and accelerate feedback between strategy creation and enactment, while raising tensions around strategic coherence, opacity of content and decisions, control over strategy processes, and the strategic and ethical implications of algorithmic mediation (Yang et al., 2024; Laamanen et al., 2025; Marabelli & Davison, 2025). Generative AI may support strategizing (Stadler & Reeves, 2023), including analysis, synthesis, drafting, prompting, and strategic communication, but privilege certain vocabularies and forms of evidence, smoothing over disagreement, and obscuring how outputs are produced. Furthermore, collaboration platforms and digitally mediated participatory processes are reshaping strategizing by widening involvement and also altering whose contributions are heard, how inputs are filtered, and how influence is distributed (Morton et al., 2020; Plotnikova et al., 2021; Ortner et al., 2024). Data infrastructures, dashboards, and other technologies of visibility may make strategy-related work more traceable and comparable, while intensifying monitoring, self-censorship, and contestation over what becomes salient and actionable (Zorina et al., 2021; Ostern et al., 2026). Platform- and ecosystem-based collaboration may extend strategizing across organisational boundaries, but make coordination, accountability, and control more difficult to sustain (Volberda et al., 2021; Möhlmann et al., 2023). Multimodal and socially mediated forms of digital strategic communication also alter how strategy is articulated, circulated, and engaged with across dispersed audiences (Heavey et al., 2020; Gritt et al., 2024; van den Broek & Gander, 2024).
At the same time, these developments are unfolding through contexts that remain comparatively underexplored. Digitally enabled self-organised collectives, for instance, already point to how strategizing emerges differently in crisis settings and outside conventional organisational centres (Morton et al., 2023). Online communities, platform ecosystems, decentralised settings, microenterprises, and various public or third-sector environments similarly complicate inherited assumptions about where strategizing occurs, who performs it, and how influence is exercised (Karanasios & Slavova, 2018; Morton et al., 2020; Plotnikova et al., 2021; Zorina, 2021; Gritt et al., 2024). In such settings, strategizing may depend less on formal hierarchy and more on dispersed actors, digital infrastructures, community dynamics, and fluid organisational boundaries. Equally, settings shaped by geopolitical tensions, technological dependence, contested digital infrastructures, or distinct culturally and historically embedded practices of organising can alter how participation is configured, what becomes visible, and how strategic coordination and judgement are accomplished (Vaara & Lamberg, 2016; Davison & Andrade, 2018; Lebovitz et al., 2022; Luo & Van Assche, 2023; Karanasios et al., 2026). This is especially important in indigenous, peripheral, and other non-traditional sites of strategizing, where digital technologies may intersect with distinctive histories, institutions, and forms of influence that remain underexplored in mainstream IS and strategy research. Underexplored contexts therefore do more than extend the empirical range of digital strategizing research; they surface important but still insufficiently understood challenges of inclusion, coordination, visibility, strategic judgement, and control.
We invite contributions that attend to emerging forms and underexplored contexts of digital strategizing. Such contributions can advance understanding of how strategizing is being reconfigured through digital technologies, while extending established work on the topic in JSIS (Gable, 2020). The special issue aims to appeal broadly across both IS and strategy communities. A central ambition running from Peppard et al. (2014) and Whittington (2014) to Morton et al. (2022) has been to build stronger bridges between IS and strategy scholars through the study of strategizing with technology. This special issue continues that agenda, speaking directly to IS scholars working on digital technologies, AI, platforms, communities, visibility, and digitally mediated organising, while appealing to strategy scholars, where there has been growing interest in the connections between digital technologies, materiality, digital transformation, strategy process, strategy work, and contemporary forms of strategizing (e.g., Dameron et al., 2015; Volberda et al., 2021; Kohtamäki et al., 2022; Prashantham & Healey, 2022; Splitter et al., 2022; Kratochvil, 2025; Jarzabkowski et al., 2025). We welcome both empirical and conceptual contributions, but submissions relying on primary data are encouraged. The special issue takes an inclusive approach to methods, including ethnographic, processual, longitudinal, comparative, experimental, design science, and multi-method designs. However, approaches must consider close attention to digital technologies and strategizing. Potential topics include the following, with authors encouraged to focus on emerging forms, underexplored contexts, or the intersection between the two.