[AISWorld] CfPSpecial Issue "Technology for Humanity” at Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE / WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK)

[Hanna Krasnova]

Call for Papers: Special Issue "Technology for Humanity” at Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE / WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK)

The past decades have been marked by the rapid digitization of almost every part of human life. Our work and private life, healthcare, education, governmental institutions, and society as a whole have been undergoing an era of rapid change driven by new forms of digital communication, automation, new information sources, emerging digital markets, and social networks, as well as digital practices and workflows. With this transition that some analysts refer to as a ‘digital transformation’ and some intellectuals speculate to be a ‘2nd Neolithic revolution’, come many ethical and value-related questions and challenges that are of high relevance for humanity. At the core, we must ask ourselves how we should technically and organizationally design and organize our IT-driven world so that humans can flourish in it (Spiekermann 2016). How can we build “Technology for Humanity” as the IEEE standardization organization promotes in its logo?

The pressing nature of these grand challenges demands a more comprehensive understanding of the undergoing transformation beyond the study of standalone values. In response, policymakers have taken numerous initiatives, for example, at the international level by announcing seventeen sustainable development goals and at the local level by creating large-scale publicly-financed research projects like the Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society in Berlin. In a similar vein, many BISE/IS institutes have woken up on this call by establishing such important initiatives as the Sustainability Lab at Vienna University of Economics and Business or by jointly collaborating on research projects that seek to address these issues. In addition to investigating privacy issues and personal data markets (e.g., Spiekermann et al. 2015; Krasnova et al. 2010; Trang et al. 2020), BISE /IS scholars have embarked on studying the fundamental issues of human control, autonomy, and freedom vis-à-vis technology (e.g., Spiekermann and Pallas 2005). Among others, these research efforts have contributed to a better understanding of potential biases inherent in AI design (e.g., Lambrecht and Tucker 2019; Bauer et al. 2020), algorithmic work management (e.g., Möhlmann et al. 2021), echo chambers, and filter bubbles (e.g., Kitchens et al. 2020), health and well-being implications of ICT use in work (e.g., Benlian 2020) and social media (e.g., Krasnova et al. 2015; Krause et al. 2021) contexts, user perceptions in the context of online targeted political advertising (e.g., Baum et al.  2021), among others. In doing so, the grey human entity formerly called “user” has started to be concretized in the many distinct roles created by new ICTs: Patients are now studied in relation to health applications (Mueller et al.  2018), citizens as natural participants of e-government processes (e.g., Tan et al. 2013; Nishant et al. 2019), crowd-workers in the context of their algorithmic supervisors (e.g., Straub et al. 2015; Cram et al. 2020), social networking users in the face of gamified platforms intentionally designed to be addictive (e.g., Turel and Serenko 2012), life-loggers with a view to personal data markets (e.g., Risius et al. 2020; Trang et al. 2020), to name a few.

Against the background of these developments, we seek to elicit papers in this area for the BISE Special Issue “Technology for Humanity”. Submissions to this special issue are encouraged from all theoretical and methodological perspectives. Thus, submissions can either investigate people in their specific roles and reactions to technology, relate to technology design or design methods to foster humanity and sustainability, be of a conceptual nature to better grasp the technological and economic changes we are witnessing, or review user studies and/or technologies of interest in this research domain. Authors must clearly outline why their contribution is new and interesting for research and practice and how they contribute to human and social value creation through their work.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

Dignity and respect
Inequality
Freedom, liberty, transparency and autonomy
Privacy, trust, control and freedom
Friendship, social support and inclusion
Bias, fairness and transparency
Digital work, digital labor markets and the gig economy
Personal data markets
Digital society (e.g., fake news, online radicalization, cyberbullying)
Physical health and mental well-being in the context of IT use
Individual behavior and perceptions
Moral behavior
Technology mediated human judgement
Value-based system design
Privacy sensitive design, privacy by design
Attention sensitive systems
Submission Guidelines

Please submit papers by 15 May 2022 at the latest via the journal’s online submission system (http://www.editorialmanager.com/buis/ <http://www.editorialmanager.com/buis/>). Please observe the instructions regarding the format and size of contributions to Business & Information Systems Engineering (BISE). Papers should adhere to the submission general BISE author guidelines (https://www.bise-journal.com/author_guidelines <https://www.bise-journal.com/author_guidelines>).

All papers will be reviewed anonymously (double-blind process) by at least two referees with regard to relevance, originality, and research quality. In addition to the editors of the journal, including those of this special issue, distinguished international scholars will be involved in the review process.

Schedule

Deadline for submission: 15 May 2022 
Notification of the authors, 1st round: 1 August 2022
Completion Revision 1: 1 October 2022
Notification of the authors, 2nd round: 1 December 2022
Completion Revision 2: 15 January 2023
Online publication: ASAP
Anticipated print publication: October 2023
Editors of the Special Issue

Sarah Spiekermann-Hoff, Prof. Dr.
Institute for Information Systems & Society 
Vienna University of Economics and Business (WU Vienna).
sspieker at wu.ac.at <mailto:sspieker at wu.ac.at>
Hanna Krasnova, Prof. Dr.
Professor for Information Systems, especially Social Media and Society
University of Potsdam
krasnova at uni-potsdam.de <mailto:krasnova at uni-potsdam.de>
Oliver Hinz, Prof. Dr.
Professor of Information Systems and Information Management
Goethe University Frankfurt
ohinz at wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de <mailto:ohinz at wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de>