[AISWorld] PACIS 2016- "Ethics and Information Systems" track

Harminder Singh harminder.singh at aut.ac.nz
Wed Feb 3 16:31:00 EST 2016


Dear Colleagues,

We would like to invite you to consider submitting a paper to the "Ethics and Information Systems" track at PACIS 2016. The growing awareness in society of the important role of businesses in addressing broader societal issues indicates that, in the future, IS management and governance should expand to consider ethical issues more closely, especially by incorporating the concerns of a wider group of parties, beyond the supply chain of each organization. In short, management and governance should shift towards a stewardship view, away from a transactional and agentic view (Davis, Schoorman & Donaldson, 1997). 

PACIS 2016 will be held in Chiayi, Taiwan from June 27 to July 1. The deadline for submissions is Friday, March 4, 2016 and the instructions for authors can be found here: http://www.pacis2016.org/Page/Index/78 

Sincerely,
Track Co-Chairs:  
Harminder Singh (hsingh at aut.ac.nz), 
Angsana Techatassanasoontorn (angsana at aut.ac.nz),
Antonio D¨ªaz Andrade (antonio.diaz at aut.ac.nz), 
Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
---------------------

# Introduction: 

¡°The economy accepts every advance in technology with a view to profit, without concern for its potentially negative impact on human beings.¡± (Pope Francis, Laudato Si, 2015)
 
This track calls for papers that examine the role of ethics in the use, management and development of information systems (IS). As individuals and organizations interact with information technology (IT) daily, they encounter a variety of ethical issues, such as privacy, sustainability, and social equity. However, research in the IS field on ethical issues is either minimal or fragmented (Smith, 2002; Mingers & Walsham, 2010). This is surprising, given the increased pervasiveness of IS in organizations and society, but understandable, given the tendency among policy-makers and businesspeople to focus on its narrow functional features and economic benefits, while understating its broader and long-term effects. This track encourages researchers to contribute to this field by crafting connections across diverse phenomena based on shared underlying principles and theories to provide guidance to academics, practitioners and policymakers.
 
# Overview:
The growing ubiquity of IT in society over the last few decades has traditionally been accompanied by praises for the efficiency savings it has led to. These have taken the form of improved coordination, cheaper communication, and an increase in the ease of carrying out transactions, which have been visible across all layers of society - e.g., individuals, organizations, and communities ¨C as well as at different levels of economic activity ¨C e.g., businesses, supply chains, and industries.
 
However, there is growing interest in adopting a broader perspective on the impacts of IT on societies, as seen in the recent special issues in the Information Systems Journal (¡°The Dark Side of IT, May 2015) and MIS Quarterly (¡°ICT and Social Challenges¡±, Forthcoming). A few issues drive this revived attention on the broader repercussions of IT. First, there is a growing awareness that IT-enabled phenomena, such as the sharing economy (e.g., AirBnB), on-demand services (e.g., Uber, Task Rabbit), and markets for micro-tasks (e.g., Amazon¡¯s Mechanical Turk), are either leveraging on or aggravating societal challenges, such as income inequality, regulatory capture by corporations, and the shrinking role of the state (Kuttner, 2013; Singer, 2014). Second, the rapid growth of the market for mobile computing devices targeted at consumers, whose use spills over into workplaces, has led to concern over the disposal of electronic waste, which is often sent to less economically-advanced countries. Alongside these issues are other concerns, such as the increased monitoring of individual activities enabled by the widespread use of mobile devices and online interaction (Boyd & Crawford, 2012; Newell & Marabelli, 2015), the hollowing-out of technical careers in industrialized countries because of the extensive use of outsourcing and automation (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2011), and various forms of IT-enabled crime.
 
While research on these developments, most of which gained prominence over the last few years, has been carried out, the focus has been on their functional features, outcomes, and contextual applications. Although useful and valuable, what has been rarer is research on how these phenomena embody ethical choices, which are often latent and not made explicit (Sojer et al. 2014). For example, some on-demand services are seen as attempts at ethical arbitrage, as their business model exploits loopholes in regulations (Lazonick & Mazzucato, 2013). Another example is that while crowdsourcing the completion of micro-tasks may be efficient for firms, the global nature of the platforms leads to a ¡°race to the bottom¡± in terms of the wages paid to the workers. A third illustration is the use of staff scheduling information systems that do not guarantee a minimum number of hours for employees, but instead place them ¡°on demand¡± so that they have to appear for work at very short notice. Finally, although the ¡°sharing economy¡± appears to be an efficient mechanism for individuals to obtain more value from their assets, this benefit is only available for those who own assets in the first place, thereby serving to entrench socio-economic differences.
 
The phenomena listed above may seem to be a disparate collection. However, they are related in that studying them requires an understanding of ethical principles and an appreciation of the value of examining impacts across multiple time horizons and levels of analysis when making decisions (Culnan & Williams, 2009). Studying these phenomena is important because it provides a more comprehensive picture of the impact of IT on our societies, and surfaces the trade-offs that are being made, sometimes subtly and at other times, more obviously. Who gains and loses, and when, because of decisions made about the design, use, and management of information systems? Are these outcomes apparent to those responsible for their staff and systems (Chatteree, Sarker & Valacich, 2015)?  Do such decisions differ across public and private sector organizations? Have such issues become more prevalent now, or are they just more visible, given the proliferation in the number of channels individuals can use to broadcast their cases?
 
# Topics
Researchers are encouraged to submit papers on the ethical aspects of IS use, management and development across all levels of analysis: individual, organizational, industrial and national. Possible topics of interest in this track include, but are not limited to: 
¡ñ Frameworks or models for IS architecture that incorporate ethical concerns;
¡ñ The governance of algorithms used in key public and/or private processes, such as security, utilities, and finance;
¡ñ Measuring the externalities of the sharing economy;
¡ñ Accounting for e-waste during the IS planning process;
¡ñ The impact of various innovations on socio-economic differences and well-being of employees and citizens;
¡ñ Ethical and societal impact of government and organizational policies and practices that promote economic benefits of IT;
¡ñ Ethical and societal implications of new media and IT;
¡ñ Frameworks to evaluate ethical impacts of IT; We expect both completed papers and research-in-progress papers for this track, using a variety of methodologies. We also encourage workshops on topics such as:
¡ñ Teaching ethics as part of information systems courses;
¡ñ Ethical frameworks and their application;
¡ñ Planning, development and use of socially inclusive technology 

References
¡ñ Boyd, D., & Crawford, K. (2012). Critical questions for big data: Provocations for a cultural, technological, and scholarly phenomenon. Information, communication & society, 15(5), 662-679.
¡ñ Brynjolfsson E, and MacAfee, A. (2011) Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution Is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment. Lexington, MA: Digital Frontier Press.
¡ñ Culnan, M. J., & Williams, C. C. (2009). How ethics can enhance organizational privacy: lessons from the Choicepoint and TJX data breaches.
MIS Quarterly, 673-687. 
¡ñ Davis, J. H., Schoorman, F. D., & Donaldson, L. (1997). Toward a stewardship theory of management. Academy of Management Review, 22(1), 20-47.
¡ñ Kuttner, R. (2013). The Task Rabbit Economy. The American Prospect, October 10.  http://prospect.org/article/task-rabbit-economy
(Accessed June 29 2015) 
¡ñ Lazonick, W., & Mazzucato, M. (2013). The risk-reward nexus in the innovation-inequality relationship: who takes the risks? Who gets the rewards?. Industrial and Corporate Change, 22(4), 1093-1128.
¡ñ Mingers, J., & Walsham, G. (2010). Toward ethical information systems: the contribution of discourse ethics. MIS Quarterly, 34(4), 833-854.
¡ñ Newell, S., & Marabelli, M. (2015). Strategic opportunities (and challenges) of algorithmic decision-making: A call for action on the long-term societal effects of ¡®datification¡¯. The Journal of Strategic Information Systems, 24(1), 3-14.
¡ñ Singer, N. (2014). In the Sharing Economy, Workers Find Both Freedom and Uncertainty. New York Times, August 16. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/17/technology/in-the-sharing-economy-workers-find-both-freedom-and-uncertainty.html (Accessed June 29 2015)
¡ñ Smith, H. J. (2002). Ethics and information systems: Resolving the quandaries. ACM SIGMIS Database, 33(3), 8-22.
¡ñ Sojer, M., Alexy, O., Kleinknecht, S., & Henkel, J. (2014). Understanding the Drivers of Unethical Programming Behavior: The Inappropriate Reuse of Internet-Accessible Code. Journal of Management Information Systems, 31(3), 287-325.
¡ñ Chatterjee, S. Sarker, S. &  Valacich, J. S. (2015) The Behavioral Roots of Information Systems Security: Exploring Key Factors Related to Unethical IT Use, Journal of Management Information Systems, 31(4), 49-87.


More information about the AISWorld mailing list