Special issue on responsible IS research for a better world

The notion that there is a moral obligation for researchers to make the world a better place is not new, yet one seldom encounters substantive research that practically espouses such a view. Noting the lack of such research, Walsham (2012) made an impassioned call to arms in a short article titled ‘Are We Making the World a Better Place with Information Systems?’. Providing further evidence of the critical need for responsible research, scholars have formed a new virtual organisation named ‘Responsible Research in Business and Management’ (RRBM). RRBM has the avowed focus of ‘inspiring, encouraging, and supporting credible and useful research in the business and management disciplines’ (http://rrbm.network). In 2019, the ISJ issued a call for papers for a special issue to encourage our colleagues to contribute to making the world a better place. Following Majchrzak et al. (2016), we suggested that contributing authors should not limit their research designs and thus contributions to the scholarly community but should also consider the practical and policy implications for a wide range of practitioners (not only managers) as well as the broader social world. Finally, they could also consider the non-human world of the environment, given our focus on making the world a better place through IS research. Thirty-nine papers were submitted to the special issue and six have, after extensive revision, been accepted. They are introduced below. We suggest that there are many different ways in which responsible research can lead to a better world. Beyond the interests of individual organisations, scholars also need to consider the grander scheme of how research can make the world a better place, not only in economic terms, but also socially, personally and environmentally. Occasionally we see articles in which it is clear that the authors are pursuing an agenda that aims to contribute to ‘making the world a better place’. Examples include: Zheng and Yu's (2016) study of the socialised affordances of social media in the processes of collective action, with a detailed examination of the ‘Free Lunch for Children’ charity in China; Tim et al.'s (2017) exploration of how the boundary-spanning competences of social media function as a digital response mechanism in natural disasters; and Díaz Andrade and Doolin's (2016) account of how Information and Communication Technologies contribute to the social inclusion of newly settled refugees. But these examples are too few and far between. Apart from articles that demonstrate the beneficial impacts of social media and IT more generally, a stream of ‘critical social IS research’ emerged in the 1990s focusing on the social and ethical implications of technology in organisations and society. Critical IS researchers have explored how IS that was deployed with the objective of increasing efficiency and instrumental rationality often also increased managerial or social control, surveillance and domination, with negative social consequences in organisations and society (see Howcroft & Trauth, 2005). Thus, the purpose of critical IS research has been to contribute knowledge with transformative and emancipatory potential in order to make the world a better place. Although recognised as a third research stream (Chen & Hirschheim, 2004; Orlikowski & Baroudi, 1991) that addressed practically, socially and ethically relevant questions, critical IS research has remained somewhat outside the mainstream. It is pertinent to note that the ISJ was one of a few premier journals to advance critical research by publishing a Special Issue ‘Exploring the Critical Agenda in IS Research’ (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al., 2008). The ISJ further published a Special Issue on ‘The Dark Side of IT Use’ (Tarafdar et al., 2015a; Tarafdar et al., 2015b) that examined negative phenomena associated with use of IT, phenomena that are often hard to articulate and investigate because institutions are reluctant to acknowledge their existence given their investments in IS infrastructures and IS enabled business models. Notwithstanding these attempts, it does not seem to be an exaggeration to suggest that, for most IS researchers, the notion that they can make the world a better place with IS is far from both their intellectual comfort zone and their scholarly intentions. For instance, Clarke and Davison (2020, p. 484), writing about personal data markets, suggest that ‘the research published in this area commonly treats the interests of marketing corporations as objectives, whereas those of consumers are conceptualized as constraints on the interests of the corporate players, and as challenges to the corporations' business models. … Much of the empirical research undertaken in this genre comprises laboratory experiments designed to help clarify how corporations can minimize the cost of persuading consumers into trading off their privacy for a service, for convenience, or for a token amount of money’. Some scholars take this a step further and suggest that customers can be persuaded to disclose confidential and private information voluntarily (i.e. without any compensation) if the organisation is able to establish a dyadic and reciprocal relationship with the consumer. As Zimmer et al. (2010, p. 404) note, individuals have the ‘inherent tendency to socially orient themselves toward another. … People are biologically wired to respond in kind to polite social advances provided those advances follow socially acceptable guidelines’. Organisations can thus leverage these inherent tendencies to solicit private information. But does research that suggests ways in which individual privacy can be undermined really help to make the world a better place? Meanwhile, research into ‘green IS’ often takes the view that a green image can help the corporate bottom line, yet fails to consider whether there are any net benefits for the environment (cf. Elliot & Webster, 2017). Similar concerns afflict other instances of IS research, notably in the management-employee tensions that characterise the implementation of enterprise systems, AI, data analytics, or robotic process automation systems. We are not suggesting that IS researchers should shun these topics, but we do suggest that researchers need to consider whose interests they are privileging, protecting, and harming. There are multiple valid stakeholders: organisations, employees, customers, ecosystem players, ignored customers, those negatively impacted by a company, and whole classes of individuals whose lives are made far worse by the ignorance, reallocation of resources, and misplaced attention devoted when only those stakeholders with primary transactional exchanges are considered, that can be the focus of research. Unfortunately, researchers often unconsciously succumb to the interests of the hegemonic forces (usually corporate entities) embodied in the de facto powers associated with the contexts that they investigate (Davison, 2018). Another example of a missed opportunity to make the world a better place relates to the technology-based start-ups that continue to drive entrepreneurship. McKendrick (2017) suggests that the rapid growth of this sector depends on a variety of technological factors such as: cloud services, low cost open source software, and big data analytics capabilities. In parallel, social entrepreneurship also continues to grow (Zimmer & Pearson, 2018), yet there is little evidence that the latter is a focus of IS researchers, who seem instead to be enchanted by the technology. If we are to make the world a better place, it is imperative to study both the technological drivers and the social aspects of entrepreneurship in the context of a broader ecosystem. In striving to make the world a better place, IS researchers often too easily simply criticise digital enterprises and initiatives (especially in developing countries) for their generation of unequal outcomes, exploitation of employees, provision of inadequate working conditions and engagement in a host of other unethical practices (Sandeep & Ravishankar, 2018). We suggest that this does not constitute the production of responsible research because it provides no theoretical or practical guidance for managing and understanding the many and diverse positive and negative impacts of digital transformation. The Senior Editors for this special issue are Robert Davison (Managing Editor), Andrew Hardin, Ann Majchrzak and MN Ravishankar. We extend grateful thanks to our advisory committee members: Geoff Walsham, Cynthia Beath, Niels Bjørn-Andersen, and M Lynne Markus. We also greatly appreciate the hard work done by the many Associate Editors who worked on the special issue: Alan Wang, Alex Wang, Antonio Díaz Andrade, Bernd Stahl, Christy Cheung, Dimitra Petrakaki, Felix Tan, Frank Chan, Helle Zinner Henriksen, Israr Qureshi, Jonas Hedman, Julien Malaurent, Martin Wiener, Mira Slavova, Ning Su, Rahul De, Richard Heeks, Silvia Masiero. The accepted papers represent what we believe are exemplars of responsible IS. The review and revision process helps us clarify the five criteria of high quality responsible IS research. (1) An information system should be examined which is being used for social good, or the social good value of the information system under study is given a priority. (2) Perspectives representing the full range of stakeholders are studied beyond those engaged in the immediate transactional exchange related to the system. The perspectives should include those disaffected by the system, those ignored by the system, those receiving secondary negative and positive impacts and those affected in any way such that the system's creation and introduction to a varying degree, succeeds or fails to succeed at making the world a better place. (3) Theory is developed specifically for that social goods context. The theory takes into account the compassionate needs of the multiple stakeholders involved. (4) Efforts are made to generalise and abstract the theory back to the mainstream IS literature on IS in general. While such abstraction will lose the excitement to some degree of the research, the effort will help to make clearer how the study of responsible IS is similar and yet unique from mainstream IS. Such differentiation will help to build a community of IS researchers who will eventually (in our dreams) usurp the subcommunities in the IS discipline who prefer to stay focused on narrow economic interests of firms. (5) The discussion includes IT design principles and implications for the subdiscipline of responsible IS. As a relatively immature subdiscipline, the more specific policy-based guidance we can create both for us as researchers and preferably for policymakers, the more useful will be the subdiscipline to turning the tide from world-harming IS to world-enhancing IS. The first exemplar in our special issue is by Giddens et al. (2023), a team that is comprised of two academics and a practitioner. They meet the first criterion by examining how resources affect the use of an information system designed to counter domestic sex trafficking in the USA. Meeting the second criterion, they use a qualitative approach and the conservation of resources theory as a lens to understand the different perspectives of a domestic sex trafficking app, yielding a nicely theorised set of four different types of perspectives. They meet the third criterion by depicting a theory specifically for social goods types of apps in which the heavily constrained resources that are available in social goods are narrowly distributed based one's organisation and technology capabilities. They meet the fourth criterion by generalising their theory to what they call a Resources Model of Information Technology Use that highlights four types of users based on varying levels of organisational and technology resources. Finally, they meet the fifth criterion by describing such an example of IT design principles in the context of resource constrained organisations that are introducing new information technologies as responsible IS research practices. In the second exemplar in this special issue, Nussbaumer et al. (2023) note that large scale disasters present decision makers with complex life and death decisions. They meet the first criterion of responsible IS research by examining a decision support system that is used in the context of emergency management. They meet the second criterion by considering the ethical issues central to their context, while ensuring that they take into consideration the needs of a variety of stakeholders, viz.: researchers and practitioners in public health, and particularly emergency management; the potential victims of a disaster, that is, members of the public. For the third criterion, they adapt an existing theory (ethics by design) to the context of emergency management, ensuring that the interests of a variety of stakeholders are central. Thus, the authors build on the growing body of literature on ethics and technology usage while shifting the discussion toward ethical IS design and development. With respect to the fourth and fifth criteria, the authors demonstrate how an ethics-by-design approach was applied in the development of a decision support system to support strategic level emergency management decision makers. The resulting framework guides the selection of ethical values and demonstrates practical replicable strategies for delivering ethical design that considers multiple stakeholder perspectives. Though firmly grounded in the domain of emergency management, the paper concludes with a discussion on how the ethics-by-design approach could be applied in other contexts. In the third exemplar article of this special issue, Mettler et al. (2023) observe that making the world better through ICT also implies that marginalised groups of society can benefit from and get access to digital services. The authors meet the first criterion of responsible IS research by examining how assistive technologies (AT) can be made more accessible to the people who need them (potential users, family members and caregivers): these technologies usually considerable training as well as advanced technical setup that may discourage less technically-aware or financially disadvantaged people, especially the elderly. The second criterion relates to stakeholders: the authors focus on the end users of the AT devices, and examine the benefits of a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach that democratises access to AT. As a design science project, the article does not respond to normative criteria related to theory. Instead, they demonstrate that participatory and engaged design research with a wide variety of stakeholders is beneficial for the acceptability of the product and the DIY-process. The building instructions and the code for a homecare remote monitoring systems are freely downloadable from the authors' website. The findings are of particular value in societies where elderly people neither choose to live at home with extended families who could care for them nor live in care facilities, but instead prefer to have an independent life at home. With respect to the fifth criterion, the findings are of particular relevance to the growing sub-discipline of health information systems, with a particular focus on the needs and interests of patients and their families and caregivers. In the fourth exemplar article, Ahuja et al. (2023) examine the problems associated with fragmented solutions to grand challenges, such as lack of access to education and healthcare, commonly experienced by marginalised communities. They suggest that responsible innovation (RI) is required, recognising that some digital platforms are adept at generating economic value yet also exploit and exclude certain people and thus fall short on some aspects of the ‘social good’ criterion for responsible IS research. The authors address the second criterion by addressing the legitimate needs (social and economic) of the full range of stakeholders, with a particular focus on marginalised groups in two distinct locations: a city in southern India, and a community of First Nations people in Canada's far North. 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