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**Special Issue in Information & Organization: Digital
Technology, Societal Change, and Institutional Logics**
Call for Papers:
Digital technologies are increasingly a source of large-scale
societal change resulting in positive transformation yet also
grand challenges. Advancing our understanding of how these
societal changes are related to the materiality of digital
technologies requires attention to how technology is becoming
integral to the institutional processes that define
twenty-first-century societies. Analyses are needed of the ways
technology is becoming a defining element of the institutional
logics that shape individual cognition, action, and evaluation in
the different areas of social life. For this special issue, we
seek empirical and conceptual papers that explore how digital
technology is altering established institutional arrangements and
changing the multiplicity of institutional logics in different
domains of society.
Guest editors:
Dr. Isam Faik
Western University, Ivey Business School, London, Canada
Dr. Eivor Oborn
University of Warwick, Warwick Business School, Coventry, England,
United Kingdom
Dr. Patricia Thornton
HEC Paris / Texas A&M University, Strategy and Business
Policy, Institute for Society & Organizations, Department of
Sociology, United States of America
Dr. Thomas Gegenhuber
Johannes Kepler University Linz and Leuphana University Lüneburg,
Lüneburg, Germany
Special issue information:
Digital technologies are increasingly a source of large-scale
societal change resulting in positive transformation, yet also
grand challenges. On the one hand, the use of digital technologies
in organizing social and economic activity has been shown to help
alleviate poverty (Jha, Pinsonneault, & Dubé, 2016, Oborn,
Barrett, Orlikowski, Kim 2019), increase social inclusion (Andrade
& Doolin, 2016), and foster political participation (Selander
& Jarvenpaa, 2016). On the other hand, digital technologies
have been shown to increase systemic risks (Tarafdar, Gupta, &
Turel, 2013), reduce employment standards (Brynjolfsson &
McAfee, 2012), and undermine democratic processes (Allcott &
Gentzkow, 2017).
While these prior studies demonstrate the power of digital
technology to affect specific contexts, this call for new research
papers draws attention to the need for a more general theoretical
understanding of the effects of digital technology on institutions
as well as its effects on large-scale institutional change at the
societal level. One promising avenue to explore in advancing
theory development is to engage in analyses of the ways digital
technology is becoming a defining element of the institutional
logics that shape individual and organizational attention,
cognition, and behavior. How does the materiality (Jones, Meyer,
& Hollerer, 2017) of digital technology affect the
institutions that comprise society? Digital technologies are
undoubtedly integral to the wide range of institutional processes
that define twenty-first century societies. In particular,
understanding societal-level changes requires theory and analyses
of the ways technology is becoming a defining element of the
institutional logics that shape action and evaluation in the
different areas of social life (Faik, Barrett, & Oborn, 2020).
Such analyses can enable scholars to explore how technology is
altering the multiplicity of logics in different domains and
generating new institutional arrangements. They can also help us
explore how the multiplicity of institutional logics might shape
and influence the way technologies become created, used, which
goals are attended to, and which stakeholders and agents benefit
by becoming more active in the process of societal change. We need
studies, for example, that investigate how and why some
institutional logics are becoming more salient as a result of
technological change while other logics are being undermined and
silenced into dormancy (Gawer & Phillips, 2013). We need to
learn more about how technological change is increasing the
compatibility of certain institutional logics while heightening
the contradictions and tensions among others (Berente & Yoo,
2012).
Despite significant advances in theorizing the relationship
between technological and institutional change (Orlikowski and
Barley 2001; Scott, 2013; Berente and Seidel 2022), the focus in
the literature has been on change at the organizational and
inter-organizational levels (Winter, Berente, Howison, &
Butler, 2014). There is now a need for systematic studies that can
enrich our theoretical repertoire for explaining the implications
of technological change at the societal level. We need to advance
our theorizing of the constitutive role of technology in
large-scale societal changes, for example by enabling new actor
constellations (Hinings, Gegenhuber and Greenwood 2018), rendering
certain institutional logics more available, accessible, and
active (Gawer and Phillips 2013) and how collective action may be
linked to new sources of meaning (Raviola and Norbak 2013).
Research Themes and Questions
This special issue aims to contribute to the development of our
theoretical repertoire for studying the complex relationship
between technology and societal change, along with its
implications for individuals and organizations. We therefore call
for empirical and conceptual papers that examine the relationship
between the materiality of technological changes and the
corresponding changes of established institutional arrangements.
Studies can fall within one of the following broad themes:
1. Digital Technologies, Institutional Changes, and Societal
Outcomes:
Technology-enabled institutional changes are generating diverse,
and often paradoxical, societal outcomes. Studies under this theme
would develop institutional explanations for how the diffusion of
digital technologies is changing the conditions of poverty (Li et
al. 2019; Ravishankar 2021), social marginalization (Chan et al.
2016), gender equity (McGee 2018), democracy (Leong et al. 2020),
and surveillance (Bekkers et al. 2013; Zuboff 2015). Studies are
needed that advance our understanding of the institutional changes
through which digital technologies become integral to solutions
for addressing grand societal challenges (Gumusay, Claus &
Amis 2020). The questions that can be addressed under this theme
include:
- How does the interaction of institutions and digital
technologies affect societal outcomes such as inclusion, equality,
and prosperity?
- How is the growing prevalence of digital technologies creating
new institutional conditions that favor some solutions but not
others in responding to societal challenges such as natural
disasters, climate change, and pandemics?
- How does the integration of digital technologies into
established institutions impact contemporary popular press and
public policy issues such as democratic election integrity, voter
fraud, fake news, media bias, and censorship?
2. Digital Transformation of Established Institutional
Arrangements:
The literature offers various frameworks for conceptualizing
digital transformation as a process of institutional change
(Gegenhuber et al. 2022; Hinings et al. 2018). However, our
analyses of the mechanisms through which digital technologies
become integral to institutional change remain limited. Digital
technologies have been conceptualized as both carriers of
institutions and triggers of institutional change (Berente and
Seidel 2022). We therefore need to investigate when and how
digital technologies are a source of stability and when they are a
source of change. Studies under this theme would advance our
understanding of how digital technologies reinforce dominant
institutional logics, how they allow alternative institutional
logics to become dominant (Faik, Barrett, & Oborn, 2020), and
how they create conditions for institutional hybridity in which
multiple logics co-exist (Pache & Thornton, 2021; Besharov and
Mitzinneck, 2021). The questions that can be addressed under this
theme include:
- How are emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence,
blockchain, and the internet of things, challenging or reinforcing
dominant institutional logics or activating previously dormant
institutional logics?
- How does the rapid scaling of new technologies, such as social
media platforms, alter institutions and institutional logics?
- How are digital technologies enabling and/or constraining the
emergence of hybrid institutional logics, hybrid organizing, and
collaborative governance?
3. Effect of institutional contexts on digital technologies
Institutional contexts shape how actors create and use digital
technologies (Barley, 1986; Barrett and Walsham 1999). For
example, numerous studies showed how institutional forces in
various regulatory contexts lead to variations in the operation
and usage of platform services such as Uber (Davis and Sina, 2021;
Uzunca et al. 2018). Recently, Gegenhuber et al. (2022) call for a
deeper exploration of practices and culture of the sites where
technologies are (re-)produced. For example, the Silicon Valley
digital ecosystem embraces technological solutionism, an
ultra-growth-at-all costs model and idealizes the (male) lone
entrepreneur, which arguably shapes what kind of technology is
created and can result in exclusionary practices when designing
new digital technologies. These considerations may lead to
exploring following questions:
- How do institutional contexts affect the development, adoption,
implementation, use, and scaling of digital technologies?
- How does fragmentation of the institutional environment and
contending institutional logics affect how digital technologies
are used and evaluated?
- In what ways do institutional logics shape the evolution of
digital ecosystems
4. Institutional Logics and Digital Technologies
When Thornton and colleagues (2012) expanded the ideal types of
the interinstitutional system with the community logic, they drew
on work studying contemporary communities such as open source
communities (e.g., O'Mahony and Ferraro, 2007; O'Mahony and
Lakhani, 2010). Against this backdrop, we understand this volume
as an invitation to explore how actors using and practicing
digital technology offer an opportunity to push the theoretical
conversation around institutional perspectives and theories, such
as institutional logics. While there has been some progress (e.g.
establishing the link between affordances and institutional
logics; Falk et al., 2020), much remains to be explored. Such
endeavors will also raise methodological questions, for example
how to detect categorical elements of institutional logics in
digital interfaces or algorithms. Hence, we suggest the following
questions are worth exploring:
- How does a focus on digital technology change what we know,
i.e., theoretical mechanisms and scope conditions, of classic
theory, e.g., loose coupling and symbolic management (Meyer and
Rowan, 1977; Westphal & Park, 2020) and isomorphism (DiMaggio
and Powell, 1983) in neo-institutional theory, conflicting logics
in the institutional logics perspective (Thornton, Ocasio and
Lounsbury, 2012), valuation of categories (Durand and Paolella,
2016; Durand and Thornton, 2018; Zuckerman 2017) and
organizational and institutional hybridity (Battilana, Besharov
& Mitzinneck, 2017)?
- How do digital technologies interact with the categorical
elements of institutional logics such as expressions of identity,
authority, and legitimacy (Thornton, Ocasio and Lounsbury, 2012)?
- How do we study institutional logics methodologically given the
new digital realities of our empirical contexts?
Submission:
Regular submission to Information and Organization, as well as
submissions to the Research Impact and Contributions to Knowledge
(RICK) section will be considered. Authors are encouraged to
review the aims and scope statement for the journal
(
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/information-and-organization)
and review abstracts of recent publications via the Science Direct
link on the website to better understand the journal's focus and
publication genre. Regular submissions should have the potential
for a substantive contribution to theory that complements
empirical results or case studies reports. RICK submissions are
briefer (approx. 8000 words) and address the impact or translation
of scholarly knowledge broadly. Authors considering a RICK
submission should review the overview of RICK genre on the website
and recent RICK publications
(
https://www.journals.elsevier.com/information-and-organization/call-for-papers/special-section-call-for-papers-research-impact-and-contribt).
Important Dates:
Submissions for the first round open: March 15, 2023
Deadline for First-round submissions: June 15, 2023
First-round decisions: October 15, 2023
Second Round submissions: February 15, 2024
Second Round Decisions: June 15, 2024
Manuscript submission information:
The Information and Organization's submission system will be open
for submissions to our Special Issue from 15 March 2023. When
submitting your manuscript please select the article type "VSI:
Technology, Society, Institutional Logics".
All submissions deemed suitable to be sent for peer review will be
reviewed by at least two independent reviewers. Once your
manuscript is accepted, it will go into production, and will be
simultaneously published in the current regular issue and pulled
into the online Special Issue. Articles from this Special Issue
will appear in different regular issues of the journal, though
they will be clearly marked and branded as Special Issue articles.
Please ensure you read the Guide for Authors before writing your
manuscript. The Guide for Authors and link to submit your
manuscript is available on the Journal's homepage.
Inquiries, including questions about appropriate topics, may be
sent electronically to Isam Faik:
ifaik@ivey.ca.
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