Daniel Gozman, University of Sydney

Tom Butler, University College Cork

Kalle Lyytinen, Case Western Reserve University

The rise of information technology (IT) in organizations has been an inherent part of an agenda to increase and shape forms of social control. Despite the inherent link between uses of IT and social control, the topic of regulation has not received significant attention in the information system field – neither theoretically nor empirically. This special issue seeks to address this gap.

The issue explores the growing and significant interplay between IT and regulation in the age of digitalization, where new challenges with social control with IT are emerging. In this special issue, we are interested in two broad domains of research related to regulation and IT: regulation through IT and regulation of IT.

The first domain – regulation through IT – concerns new forms and arenas of regulation enacted through innovative IT solutions (often called “RegTech”). These technologies which are increasingly implicated in regulatory practices include new forms of real-time big data analytics, machine learning and other artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, use of blockchains and distributed ledgers, Internet of Things solutions or natural language processing techniques. These technologies change the ways organizations and industrial sectors respond to and comply with a growing number of regulatory obligations and needs. These technologies are also driving changes in the ways in which regulators seek to supervise and monitor firms and the ways in which firms comply with laws and regulations. Greater market and organizational transparency and enhanced supervision are now advocated as critical responses to organizational misconduct and associated risks. This has resulted in an increasing call for bureaucratization and (over-) regulation. Call for greater monitoring, supervision and sanctioning have been driven by concerns regarding the environment, health and safety risks, corporate fiscal and fiduciary scandals, financial failures leading to financial crisis in 2007-2008, or growing violations of data privacy that increased the “volume, velocity and variety” of laws and regulations that organizations must comply with and the range of novel IT based solutions they need to comply to such demands. Regulators have also shown a growing appetite to measure performance, to quantify financial, regulatory and operational risk and to improve compliance reporting through new technologies that assign accountability, enforce security and behavioural control, automate monitoring and enhance record keeping.

The second domain – regulation of IT – is the wide range deployment and associated regulatory effects of new IT (especially concerns of security, privacy and/or safety). There is a notable gap in the field’s knowledge regarding new demands and ways of regulating IT (e.g., social media) given its scale, complexity and pervasive use. Concerns regarding the pervasive effects of platform businesses on privacy, competition and information veracity have invited calls to control and scrutinize technology vendors. Similar issues are likely to emerge in autonomous cars, user-based insurance, health policies and so on. There are consequently increased demands to regulate various IT solutions and to increase regulatory powers of governments related to IT uses, including through introducing entirely new regulatory bodies. If platform providers and vendors, or organizations offering extensive algorithmic solutions as parts of their related services, are subjected to new regulatory structures, then important questions arise regarding what degrees of transparency and reporting are appropriate and how related forms of supervision and sanctioning would function that need to regulate actual systems and their functioning and those who are implicated in their design.

We invite empirical and theoretical research that contribute to our understanding and application how regulation is enacted through IT or how uses of IT can be regulated. We encourage submissions that use diverse epistemological and methodological approaches to focus on emerging and new regulatory solutions and practices. Submissions may engage in cross-disciplinary inquiries and should offer novel knowledge and fresh methodological, theoretical and empirical insights how regulation and IT evolve and are related. The papers will be evaluated for their interestingness, novelty and credibility of the contribution. If in doubt, interested authors should consult the special issue guest editors whether their papers fall within the scope of the special issue. To this end, authors are encouraged to submit an extended abstract to the editors for initial feedback.

Potential topics

• Regulatory technologies for supervising and complying (regulation through IT)
• Regulation of social media technologies and platforms
• Regulation of IT solutions and related solutions during design, implementation and use
• Regulation of AI
• How to bridge the gap between ethics and policy (e.g., for AI)
• Strategic implications of regulating technologies for nations, industries and firms
• Solutions for data privacy, protection, governance and "fake news"
• Cybersecurity obligations and mitigating related risks at the organizational level

Timeline

• January 31, 2021: First round submission
• March 1, 2021: Round 1 decision to authors
• July 1, 2021: Second round submission
• September 1, 2021: Second round decision to authors
• November 1, 2021: Third and Final Round submissions
• December 1, 2021: Final decision to authors

Associate editors

• Barney Tan, University of Sydney
• Chris Parker, American University
• David Tilson, University of Rochester
• Eric Lim, University New South Wales
• Francois de Vaujany, Université Paris - Dauphine
• Frantz Rowe, Université de Nantes
• Heiko Gewald, Neu - Ulm University of Applied Science
• Jonas Hedman, Copenhagen Business School
• M. Lynne Markus, Bentley University
• Markos Zachariadis, University of Warwick
• Michael zur Muehlen, Stevens Institute of Technology
• Michel Avital, Copenhagen Business School
• Mikhail Oet, Northeastern University
• Nicholas Berente, University of Notre Dame
• Pierangelo Rosati, Dublin City University
• Roman Beck, IT University of Copenhagen
• Shazia Sadiq, University of Queensland
• Silvia Masiero, Loughborough University
• Stefan Haefliger, City University
• Theo Lynn, Dublin City University
• Uri Gal, University of Sydney
• Vladislav Fomin, University of Vilnius

Matti Rossi, Aalto University

Christy M. K. Cheung, Hong Kong Baptist University

Supratek Sarker, University of Virginia

Jason B. Thatcher, Temple University

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.

Potential topics

• Digital Taylorism and the race to the bottom for workers
• Destruction of jobs by “botization”
• Risks for society from fast-spreading false information
• Systemic risks and vulnerability of digital platforms
• Management incompetence in digital transformation
• Risks of IoT and blockchain
• Dark side and ethics of sharing economy and gig economy
• Digital privacy and surveillance capitalism
• Bias in algorithms and artificial intelligence
• Digital inequity and digital divide between “the North” and “the South”
• Fake news, misinformation, and disinformation in social media
• Fake and biased online reviews and co-creation on digital platforms
• The emergence of deep web/dark net marketplaces
• Subjective well-being (e.g., FOMO and social media fatigue)
• Cyberharassment, cyberbullying and cyberstalking

Timeline

• June 1, 2021: First round submission
• October 1, 2021: First round decision to authors
• February 1, 2022: Second round submission
• April 1, 2022: Second round decision to authors (reject or accept with minor revision)

Associate editors

• Margunn Aanestad, Agder University
• Alexander Benlian, TU Darmstadt
• Michelle Carter, Washington State University
• Tommy Chan, Northumbria University
• Mike Dinger, University of South Carolina - Upstate
• Taha Havakor, Temple University
• J. J. Po - An Hsieh, Georgia State University
• Hanna Krasnova, University of Potsdam
• Carmen Leong, UNSW Sydney
• Alvin Leung, City University of Hong Kong
• Juho Lindman, University of Gothenburg
• Jani Merikivi, Grenoble Business School
• Daniel Pienta, Baylor University
• Marten Risius, University of Queensland
• Markus Salo, University of Jyvaskyla
• Sebastian Schuetz, Florida International University
• Carsten Sorensen, London School of Economics
• Ali Sunyaev, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
• Juliana Sutanto, Lancaster University
• Manuel Trenz, University of Göttingen
• Xiao Xiao, Copenhagen Business School