[AISWorld] cfp: Immersive Technology - A New IT Artifact? Implications for IS Research, Pedagogy and Practice

[Denis Dennehy]

Cfp:  Immersive Technology - A New IT Artifact? Implications for IS Research, Pedagogy and Practice

The intellectual core of the Information Systems (IS) discipline focuses on researching the design, development, and use of IT artifacts (e.g., Orlikowski & Iacono, 2001; Weber, 2003; Sidorova et al. 2003). This socio-technical perspective, enables IS scholars to advance knowledge  about the issues the emerge between the interactions of individuals, organisations, and groups with IT artifacts (e.g., Sarker et al., 2019; Tot & Srivastava, 2007). Theories play in a critical role in this context (Gregor, 2006). IS scholars are uniquely placed to adopt different paradigms, such as behavioural or design science (e.g., Baskerville et al., 2018; Hevner et al., 2008), and draw upon various reference disciplines (Tarafdar & Davison, 2018) to develop theories on the core issues that fall in the nomological net of IS scholars (Benbasat & Zmud, 2003).

With this unique positioning, the IS discipline have an important role in developing knowledge around ‘immersive technologies’ and develop theories that captures the challenges and opportunities brought upon by this ‘new’ IT artifact. Indeed, in the last few years we have seen the rise of ‘immersive technologies’ such as Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), 3D displays, drones etc. The global market for immersive technologies, valued at USD 21.66 billion in 2021, is projected to soar to approximately USD 134.18 billion by 2030, with an annual growth rate of 22.46% from 2022 (Precedence Research, 2022). While this rapid growth of immersive technologies underlies their potential for today’s society, it also gives rise to several issues across sectors warranting academic research for developing new knowledge and theories.

These issues transcend every part of our society today. For instance, in education sector, we see the potential of ‘immersion training’ that allows knowledge sharing without a physical and distance barrier. However, this also raises the issues of reconsidering the way we understand ‘education’ and ‘teacher-learner’ relationship. Immersive technologies now allow organizations to serve customers without physical boundaries. For instance, customers can now use VR technology to know how a furniture would look in the wardrobe or how a dress will look on her. It gives rise to news ways of creating and delivery for organizations. The implications of immersive technologies are not limited to business alone. They are also driving transformative societal changes (e.g., French et al., 2020), such as changing the way we interact, learn, and transact. For instance, immersive technologies are creating the possibility of a parallel universe, metaverse (Dwivedi et al., 2022), a malleable socio-technical configuration, that allows newer forms of collaboration and value creation (Shin, 2022). This parallel universe creates a possibility to be present anywhere in the physical space, however, also be parallelly present in the metaverse using digital identifier and engage in blockchain enabled programmable value creation activities . It also allows business to be present to have dual presence, and hence newer ways of generative values. This raises critical issue of defining the boundary of space. It further raises the critical issues of how our understanding of concepts such as values, identity, social structure and social relationship are changing in this immersive technology embedded socio-technical configuration. The academic knowledge so far is limited on these issues. Particularly, we know little on—Are immersive technologies new IT artifacts (e.g., Baiyere, 2020) enabling new socio-technical ensemble (Orlikowski & Iacono, 2001), and hence what kind of theories and methodologies (e.g., John et al., 2022; Haj-Bolouri, 2023) are required to capture the issues in this new ensemble? Developing such knowledge may require newer theories and fresh methodological approaches. IS scholars may need to revisit the existing theories (e.g. technology adoption theories, social identity theory, value theories, etc.), refine them or develop new theories that capture these new realities. For instance, it would be interesting to revisit technology adoption theories to know how features immersive technology, allowing one to maintain a parallel physical and digital identity, affect their adoption decision. Value theories may need to reconsider the traditional definition of ‘values’, and embrace the parallel value creation possibilities enabled by metaverse. To this end, we invite IS scholars to submit their cutting-edge work on immersive technologies from diverse theoretical and methodology perspectives. Particularly, we invite conceptual or empirical submissions that move beyond the application of immersive technologies and advance IS theories and methodologies.

Please note that we are not interested in the papers that are either a pure descriptive application of immersive technologies or just adopts existing theories to explain an immersive technology application. Rather, we are inviting submissions that advance our theoretical knowledge of core IS issues (on the interaction of immersive technology and socio-economic structure) by revising the existing IS theories or developing new theories. Apart of theory advancement submissions, we also invite papers that provides new methodological perspectives on capturing the issues around immersive technologies.



Indicative List of Anticipated Themes

This special issue seeks a wide range of submissions that draw on diverse settings, theories, and approaches to understand the socio-technical aspects of immersive technologies  The following questions are of interest for the special issue:



  1.  What constitutes immersiveness? (Theory of immersiveness)
  2.  How do immersive technologies create economic and social value?
  3.  What are the risks associated with long term use of immersive technology?
  4.  How can immersive technology be used to address global grand challenges (e.g., environment, health, etc.) and achieve the Sustainable Development Goals?
  5.  What are the implications of immersiveness on IS education and skills development?
  6.  Are there process theories that can explain successful implementation of immersive technologies and immersive user experiences?
  7.  Is there a need for governance and regulation in the use of immersive technologies in the aspects of society and business?
  8.  What are the privacy, security and ethical considerations in the design, deployment and use of immersive technologies?
  9.
What are the societal, behavioral, and cultural implications of immersive technologies?
  10.
10. How does immersive technology change the concept of identity and social relations?

These questions are not intended to be exhaustive. Rather they are intended to advance understanding about the role of immersive technologies in a variety of contexts across various levels of analysis (e.g., individual, team, organizational, society, etc.).

Submission Guidelines

All manuscripts submitted to CAIS should be submitted in Microsoft Word format. Authors are encouraged to follow CAIS style guide (available on the CAIS website https://aisel.aisnet.org/cais/format.html) and use the CAIS author template for submissions of their manuscripts. Submissions must be made to the CAIS ScholarOne site (https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cais). If you do not have an account already, you will need to create one. Once you have logged in, and you begin the submission process, you will have the opportunity to submit the manuscript to the special issue ("SS" designation).

Important Dates
Paper Development Workshop (optional, to be held in hybrid mode): January 18-20, 2024.
Submission deadline: April 30, 2024
First round notification: June 30, 2024
Invited revisions deadline: October 31, 2024
Second/final editorial decision: December 31, 2024
Projected Publication: June 30, 2025

Guest Editor
Nripendra P. Rana, Qatar University
M N Ravishankar, Queen’s University Belfast
Mayank Kumar, MICA, India, (Coordinating Editor)
Santosh Kumar Patra, MICA, India