Thematics & GTAIM > GTAIM - Criticism, regulation and ethics of the digital transformation of organizations and societies

GTAIM - Criticism, regulation and ethics of the digital transformation of organisations and societies

Three decades after the invention of the World Wide Web, digital technologies continue to embed themselves ever more deeply into our personal lives, organisations and societies (Turel et al., 2021). Despite the expected and produced benefits, over the last decade this digital pervasiveness has highlighted the many challenges that these digital transformations of organisations and society present to us.

For individuals, technological stress, information overload and addictions accompany the use of these technologies (Tarafdar et al., 2015) while forms of dematerialised and broken down to the micro-task are developing (Deng et al., 2016). Easy and rapid access to information can lead to the enclosure of information bubbles (Kitchens et al., 2020) and the disclosure of our most intimate information (Lowry et al., 2017). At the same time, an ever-increasing amount of formerly organisational tasks are being dumped into our personal lives in the form of domestic digital labour that is as invisible as it is pervasive (Mitev, 2021).

In organisations, there are new risks of errors linked to artificial intelligence (Vayena et al., 2018), an unprecedented increase in the scale of information leakage, or new problems of exclusion of individuals from certain markets and services (Leonardi et al., 2016). No longer limited to places of use, these ethical issues are also being imposed on our societies, with, for example, the development of private surveillance logics (Zuboff, 2020), the propagation of false information (Schuetz et al., 2021) or the abuse of dominant positions by certain hegemonic players (Autorité de la concurrence, 2021).

Although attempts at regulation, high-profile lawsuits and calls to direct our research towards the 'grand challenges' of the digital world have multiplied (e.g. Majchrzak et al., 2016; Loebbecke & Picot, 2015; Córdoba & Midgley, 2008), we remain essentially helpless in the face of the speed of the digital transformations of our organisations and societies, the multiplication of the risks and ethical issues that these transformations entail, and the sometimes unexpected nature of their consequences.

Through its knowledge of social sciences and digital technologies as well as its critical tradition (Rowe, 2009; Rowe, 2018), the French-speaking community of researchers in information systems management is ideally placed to offer answers to these challenges. This GTAIM therefore aims to federate research efforts around the development of critical thinking on the digital transformations of organisations and societies, the identification and analysis of the risks that accompany these transformations, and reflections on the regulation and ethics of the digital world in order to deal with them.

Heads of the GTAIM

Etienne Thenoz (Etienne.Thenoz@univ-nantes.fr)

Nathalie Mitev (nmitev@btinternet.com)

Sylvie Michel (sylvie.michel@u-bordeaux.fr)

Mickaël Peiro (mickael.peiro@iut-tlse3.fr)

More information on the GTAIM
https://aim.asso.fr/fr/gtaim/critiques-regulation-et-ethique-de-la-transformation-digitale-des-organisations-et-des-societes