Daniel Fürstenau, Freie Universität Berlin

Ben Eaton, Copenhagen Business School

Polyxeni Vassilakopoulou, University of Adger

Elena Parmiggiani, NTNU

Lauri Wessel, European University Viadrina

Societies are increasingly forced to make binding trade-offs between competing collective goals. Digital infrastructures are the sites where these trade-offs become material, irreversible, and contested, with far-reaching implications for societal transformation (e.g., Davidson et al 2023). For instance, in healthcare, electronic health records support coordination but also reallocate authority across professional groups. These types of dynamics highlight how digital infrastructures embed trade-offs with societal implications.

A further locus of trade-offs arises in the redistribution of power, resources, and legitimacy resulting from the rapid increase in the number of digital infrastructures that are infused with Artificial Intelligence (AI). DeepMind CEO and Nobel Laurate Demis Hassabis captured a common tech-world ambition with the slogan “solve intelligence, and then use it to solve everything else.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen reflects this perspective in calls for putting “AI first” as a strategic policy imperative for Europe. These ambitions rest on the implicit assumption that achieving “artificial general intelligence” will provide solutions to society’s remaining problems. Yet this prioritization carries significant repercussions: intensified resource consumption, the amplification of existing asymmetries, and the tendency to concentrate influence and benefits in already-advantaged regions and societal groups (Zuboff, 2019; Crawford, 2021, 2024). Recent debates have also highlighted that unbounded growth, often pursued through AI deployment, entails fundamental trade-offs with other societal goals (Susskind, 2024). For example, AI depends on expanding data and compute infrastructure, increasingly drawing on energy, materials, and attention that might otherwise support alternative social priorities.

For this special issue we foreground an infrastructure perspective conceptualizing new technologies such as AI not as isolated artifacts but as woven within complex sociotechnical arrangements that span localities and temporal scales (Monteiro et al. 2013). Infrastructures are “sunk into, inside of, other structures, social arrangements, and technologies” (Bowker and Star 1999, p. 35) and they evolve amidst technical antecedents, social conventions, and professional rules (Ciborra and Hanseth 1998). Examples include smart energy grids, the widespread adoption of cloud computing, the integration of algorithmic management in, e.g., public health and welfare, and the deployment of large-scale biometric identity systems. Building on the long-established stream of IS research on infrastructures (Tilson et al., 2010; Monteiro et al., 2014; Constantinides et al., 2018), we shift attention from bounded technical systems to the evolving, shared, and heterogeneous sociotechnical assemblages that span organizational and societal domains (Monteiro et al., 2013). These assemblages are characterized by openness, generativity, and ongoing recombination supporting innovation (Bygstad, 2010). Digital infrastructures are shaped by established arrangements—from the public internet and its myriad uses in social media to growing networks of sensor data, shared standards, blockchain systems, subsea fiber-optic cables, and data centers—as well as platform ecosystems and administrative systems. This perspective allows us to situate contemporary digital transformation trends (including the increasing reliance on AI) within broader societal systems, examining how they are assembled and what their impact is.

Taking an infrastructural perspective has important analytical consequences. If digital infrastructures are embedded, evolving, and collectively shaped sociotechnical arrangements, then their development cannot be reduced to technical or organizational strategies alone. Infrastructures redistribute power, configure participation, and stabilize institutional arrangements over others. Infrastructure research has long emphasized that infrastructural arrangements are never neutral but inscribe negotiations, exclusions, and asymmetries (Bowker & Star, 1999). An infrastructural lens therefore directs attention simultaneously to (1) the regulatory processes through which infrastructures are steered and stabilized, (2) the forms of societal change enacted in and through them, and (3) the democratic discourse through which norms and priorities are negotiated within infrastructuring processes. While some trade-offs between economic growth and societal goals may be addressed through better design, others remain fundamentally intractable or wicked, illustrating that competing goals cannot always be achieved simultaneously. This special issue invites empirical research to illuminate these phenomena at the intersection of digital infrastructures and societal change.

A first pillar is regulation. While regulatory governance could theoretically restrain the entanglement of infrastructures with commercial and political interests, its effectiveness depends on the organizational actors who interpret and enforce it. Many governance arrangements in different contexts rely on self-regulation, professional associations, or post-hoc oversight, mechanisms that often prove fragile under strong economic incentives, rapid technological change, and asymmetric information access (Winter & Davidson, 2019; Olson, 2024). Powerful organizations actively shape regulations through lobbying or other forms of influence. With high stakes and limited consensus on what constitutes the “right” course of action, existing regulatory frameworks appear ill-suited to the scale, speed, and concentration of power associated with contemporary digital infrastructures, for example in the case of AI (Wareham et al., 2025). New approaches are therefore needed to check the influence of dominant actors (Mühlhoff & Ruschemeier, 2024; Mühlhoff, 2025). Yet the problem is not only one of enforcement capacity or organizational noncompliance. It is equally a problem of how organizations engage in creating regulations and of how regulatory targets are framed, translated, and rendered governable in the first place, especially when emerging technologies remain fluid in meaning, application, and risk profile (Seidel et al., 2025; Currie et al., 2025).

The coexistence of multiple institutional logics at the societal level and the shifts in their centrality and compatibility (Faik et al., 2020) demand theorizing that foregrounds emergence, multilevel dynamics, continual evolution, and localized tensions rather than stable routines and control (Majchrzak et al., 2016). From this perspective, regulation is less a fixed set of rules to implement and more an evolving sociotechnical process of contestation. As Lanamäki et al. (2025) note, the open texture of law leaves room for ambiguity, reinterpretation, and dispute. Organizations therefore do not simply “regulate” or “comply”; they engage in ongoing sensemaking around legal requirements, often without closure, especially in AI contexts where fast-moving developments and infrastructural dependencies complicate the creation and application of regulations. For IS scholarship this shifts the focus from viewing regulation as an external constraint to examining how it is intertwined with the governance, use and evolution of infrastructures, and how it is translated into technical architectures, standards, and operational practices, that reshape power, accountability, and participation (Henningsson and Eaton 2023).

A second pillar is societal change enacted in and through digital infrastructures. Current debates on digital transformation have renewed attention to equity, well-being, the situation of vulnerable groups, and to values such as fairness, inclusion, dignity, and care (Faik et al., 2020; Pang et al., 2024). Digital infrastructures do not merely support existing arrangements; they reshape social relations, resource access, and opportunities for participation (e.g., Barrett et al., 2016; Chamakiotis et al., 2020).

As they scale, digital infrastructures also intensify questions about what is right, acceptable, or desirable in society. They challenge established notions of responsibility, autonomy, and accountability by redistributing agency among individuals, organizations, and technical systems. Choices regarding data collection, algorithmic classification, and infrastructural access can reproduce and amplify inequality, or enable inclusion, yet their consequences are often borne disproportionately by marginalized groups. For IS scholarship, this raises a core set of questions: how are societal values embedded, negotiated, and enacted through digital infrastructures, and how are tensions between economic efficiency, technological feasibility, and social justice worked out in practice? How do power relations change through digital infrastructures and with what consequences for societies? Addressing these questions requires empirical research that traces both intended and unintended consequences, including value conflicts and forms of resistance that emerge in everyday use.

A third pillar is democratic discourse. Digital infrastructures now operate not only as technical backbones of economic activity but also as arenas where societal norms and priorities are negotiated, stabilized and enforced through architectures, algorithms, and standards - through code. Long emphasized in infrastructure research, such design decisions shape what becomes visible, permissible, and participatory (Bowker & Star, 1999). Today, the scale of these effects increasingly extends beyond organizations to structure mobility, inclusion, and exclusion at societal level. Democratic discourse is increasingly mediated, filtered, and operationalized by infrastructural arrangements, and nowadays AI exacerbates mis/disinformation contributing to the erosion of institutional trust and public discourse (Baiyere et al., 2025; Barrett et al., 2025).

These processes privilege some values over others. Efficiency, scalability, and speed are frequently prioritized, while equity, pluralism, care, or environmental sustainability are sidelined or translated into secondary constraints. This asymmetry raises questions about whose voices are represented in infrastructural design and governance, whose interests are marginalized, and how power shifts when social decisions are encoded into technical systems. For instance, research shows how algorithmic bias, data inequalities, and forms of data colonialism disproportionately disadvantage marginalized populations and the Global South (Arora et al., 2023). Accordingly, morality, law, and democratic legitimacy cannot be treated as external correctives applied after deployment; they are co-constituted with infrastructures themselves. This is especially the case as decision-making power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small set of corporate, technical, and political actors with the surge of AI. Research can engage with values by surfacing them and by proposing alternative value inscriptions that can contribute to building a better world and driving positive change (Zimmer et al., 2023). For IS scholarship, we encourage research on how democratic values are negotiated, translated, or foreclosed through infrastructural design, standard-setting, and governance, and on how participation, accountability, and deliberation might be strengthened in an increasingly infrastructuralized society.

The primary goal of this special issue is to advance novel empirical and conceptual research on digital infrastructures as drivers, mediators, and outcomes of societal transformation. We invite contributions that take seriously the tensions and trade-offs between economic objectives, technological innovation, and broader societal goals such as equity, sustainability, and democratic legitimacy. Rather than assuming that digital infrastructures inevitably lead to progress, the special issue seeks work that critically examines how infrastructural developments redistribute resources, power, and opportunities within and across societies.

The special issue explicitly invites contributions that acknowledge and engage with the role of values in and through digital infrastructures. We seek papers that “bring values back in” by examining how notions such as fairness, inclusion, dignity, care, sustainability, or efficiency are embedded in infrastructural designs, negotiated among stakeholders, and enacted in everyday use. Contributions may explore value conflicts, normative tensions, and moral ambiguities that arise when societal goals are translated into technical architecture, standards, and algorithms.

Finally, we intentionally adopt a broad and inclusive perspective on digital infrastructures and societal transformation. While rooted in the information systems tradition, this special issue is not limited to scholars who primarily identify as information infrastructure researchers. We welcome interdisciplinary contributions from adjacent fields and communities, recognizing that insightful work is increasingly conducted across disciplinary boundaries, methodological traditions, and empirical domains.

Potential topics

• Public–private partnerships in the development and governance of digital infrastructures
• Healthcare system transitions and infrastructural change (well-being, vulnerable populations, equity)
• Scientific knowledge production through large-scale infrastructures (e.g., AlphaFold, AlphaZero, CERN, large research data infrastructures)
• Migration, asylum, and border control infrastructures (e.g., digital identity systems, risk scoring, biometric databases)
• Digital infrastructures for societal and institutional building (e.g., financial systems, telecommunications, healthcare, identity infrastructures)
• Infrastructural asymmetries, technological dependency, and unequal global development
• Inclusion, exclusion, and leapfrogging through digital infrastructures
• Energy, water, and material footprints of digital and AI infrastructures
• Circular transitions and infrastructural redesign
• Tensions between technological acceleration and sustainability goals
• Regulatory conditions enabling the concentration of economic value and infrastructural power (e.g., market design, competition law, public procurement)
• Platformization, monopolization, and infrastructural lock-in as outcomes of regulatory choices and omissions
• Distributional effects of regulated and unregulated digital infrastructures across regions and social groups
• Long-term societal transformations enabled or constrained by digital infrastructures
• Shifts in work, care, governance, and social organization
• Unintended consequences, resistance, and contestation around infrastructures

Timeline

• October 1, 2026: Call for papers open
• March 30, 2027: Submission Deadline to SI at I&O
• September 30, 2027: First round revisions due
• March 31, 2028: Second round revisions due
• November 10, 2028: Publication of the special issue
• Invite papers from III workshop for submission
• Special Issue workshop, timing aligned with the ICIS period