Information & Organization
Call for Papers - Special Issue on ***Digital Technology, Societal Change, and Institutional Logics***
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:
Isam Faik
Western University, Ivey Business School, London, Canada
Eivor Oborn
University of Warwick, Warwick Business School, Coventry, England, United Kingdom
Patricia Thornton
HEC Paris / Texas A&M University, Strategy and Business Policy, Institute for Society & Organizations, Department of Sociology, United States of America
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: https://www.elsevier.com/journals/information-and-organization/1471-7727/guide-for-authors.
Inquiries, including questions about appropriate topics, may be sent electronically to ifaik@ivey.ca">Isam Faik: ifaik@ivey.ca.