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Research Techniques for Near-Future Phenomena
with Illustrative Applications to the DigiVeillance Domain

Review Version of 13 August 2025

Extended Abstract (max. 1500 words) for pre-submission to a Special Issue of JIT on 'Digital Futures'

Roger Clarke **

© Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, 2025

This document is at http://rogerclarke.com/DV/FSD.html

Extended Abstract

Futures studies techniques can be applied to potential circumstances relatively distant in time. For example, (Schlagwein et al. 2025, p.3) tie 'digital futures' to the long-term, and (Hovorka & Mueller 2025) discuss 'speculative foresight' and 'envisioning' about distant futures and imagined phenomena, with an illustrative scenario set 20 years hence. This paper reports on a complementary approach, with a focus on near-future phenomena. Near-futures research imagines plausible alternative worlds in which an accumulation of technological features gives rise to materially changed behaviours, or begin with the present world but inject into it a specific, disruptive technological innovation.

The approach advanced in this paper is 'pragmatic'. This is meant firstly "in the sense in which that term is used in philosophy, that is to say it is concerned with understanding and action, rather than merely with describing and representing" (Clarke 2021). However, the populist sense of 'pragmatic' is also encompassed, "dealing with matters in accordance with practical rather than theoretical considerations ... matter-of-fact, practical, down-to-earth" (OED 5). The attribute of pragmatism is important at least for that proportion of research activities that seek relevance to strategic and tactical decision-makers and to policy-makers.

Over the 60 years during which the information systems (IS) discipline has developed, there has been vast growth in IT and IS capabilities, scale and scope, the porousness of organisational boundaries, and the recruitment of outsiders to capture data and to self-serve. Many IS users are outside the system sponsor's boundaries. There are also a great many impacted entities who are non-participant 'usees' (Berleur & Drumm 1991 p.388, Clarke 1992, Fischer-Huebner & Lindskog 2001, Baumer 2015).

Digitisation is mature, with most data now born digital. There has been growth in data volume, data-sources, data-sharing, and data diversity and incompatibilities. Data analysis increasingly uses obscure, purely empirical methods that cannot provide rational explanations. Increasing levels of delegation are granted to artefacts to draw inferences, make decisions and act directly on the world. Meanwhile, there is enormous rapidity of change in IT and adaptation of IS.

'Digitalisation' refers to the shift from the interpretation and management of the world through human perception and cognition, to processes that are almost entirely dependent on digital data (Brennen & Kreis 2016). The social distance between institutions and individuals grew throughout the second half of the 20th century. The features of IT and IS outlined above have resulted in the gap becoming a chasm. Individuals are using intended features of IS, and unintended or emergent 'affordances', with attitudes and intentions that range from enthusiastic participation, through collaboration, sullen compliance, psuedo-consented acceptance and sceptical participation, to subversion and sabotage.

As IS research enters the second quarter of the 21st century, it continues to reflect the relatively slowly-changing patterns of 50 years ago. The discipline places a great deal of emphasis on empirical research. The approved research techniques make a considerable number of metatheoretic assumptions, which are mostly subliminal and hence implicit. Important examples are listed in Table 1. The characteristics of contemporary IS outlined above undermine the ontological and epistemological assumptions (2)-(6). The complexity, obscurity and rapidity of technologically-enabled and -driven change are such that phenomena are increasingly ephemeral, and inconsistent over time as well as space, culture and individuals. The reliability of data, meanwhile, is limited by the costs of capture and the tight foci of data-creators. The methodological assumption (7) is dependent on the reliability of the first six.

Table 1: Key Assumptions Inherent in Empirical Research in IS

In the fourth realm, axiology, researchers seldom explicate their metatheoretic assumptions. The Greek word 'axios' is concerned with 'worth'. Axiology encompasses the nature and classification of value and how value is imputed to things (Clarke 2021). An ethicist may consider value on what meta-theorists call a 'virtue' dimension of 'good / bad'. An alternative, 'deontic' approach is related to duty or obligation, on a 'mandated / optional / forbidden' dimension. A further school of thought very relevant to IS is 'teleological', having to do with purpose. The notion of 'utility' is concerned with impacts or outcomes, and 'consequentialism' involves the proposition that an action must be evaluated on the basis of its impacts or outcomes in relation to purpose.

Technologically-based interventions into socio-technical systems impinge on many stakeholders. Stakeholder theory has shown that the interests of those with least power have the least attention paid to them, irrespective of the degree of legitimacy of their concerns (Mitchell et al. 1997, Achterkamp & Vos 2008, p.753). Work on researcher perspective has established that about 90% of empirical IS works adopt the perspective of a single stakeholder, and that in about 90% of those works it is the system sponsor's interests that are in focus (Clarke & Davison 2020, Clarke et al. 2020). The conventional axiological assumptions (8)-(10) are no longer justifiable in a world of IS of large scale, broad scope and high impact on user- and usee-stakeholders. Some scholars argue that leaving axiological assumptions implicit is inadequate, and that "[IS] research is a moral-political activity that requires researchers to commit to a value position" (Cecez-Kecmanovic 2021, 17, 32, emphasis added).

A further issue with empirical techniques in IS venues is that they routinely report on data that relate to a world 3-5 years in the past. (The effects of 'lag' are sometimes considered in such areas as the delay in benefits arising from IS investment; but delays between data-observations and the use of research outputs appear to be seldom studied). Lessons from backward-looking research are of limited value to decision-makers. A great deal of contemporary IS research exhibits high-grade rigour, but with low-grade relevance.

Futures studies techniques (FSTs) are intended to cope with the unobservability of near-future phenomena (Halicka 2016, Table 3, p.589, cited in Niederman 2023, Schlagwein et al. 2025). Some literary sub-genres are also relevant, perhaps hard science fiction, but particularly social science fiction and soft science fiction. FSTs are applied in many disciplines, including some cognate with IS; but they have been far less acceptable to IS publishing venues than theoretical and empirical work. This is despite the considerable extent to which conventional IS research features broad speculation in the form of newly-proposed theories, specific speculation in the form of hypotheses generated from existing theories, and the purposeful future-shaping embodied in design science (Davison & Schwabe 2025, p.2).

This paper illustrates the opportunities that futures studies offer, by considering a research domain that has hitherto been largely avoided by IS academics. A selection of some key FSTs is identified in Table 2, with exemplar research questions drawn from the research domain that I refer to here as 'DigiVeillance'.

Table 2: Some Future Studies Research Questions
mapped to Candidate Futures Studies Techniques

From the 1980s onwards, physical surveillance was augmented, then displaced, by the far more economic approach of DataVeillance (Clarke 1988, Michael & Clarke 2013). Digitisation and digitalisation are deepening the entrenchment of powerful and impactful forms of surveillance. To reflect that, I coined a further term:

'DigiVeillance' refers to the leveraging of 'born digital' data, and the interpretation and management of the world through that data, to support the systematic investigation or monitoring of objects, spaces and people

The scope exists for IS research to deliver much greater value not only to system sponsors, but also to user- and usee-stakeholders within and beyond organisations, by means of disciplined examinations of near-future DigiVeillance phenomena. The completed paper will identify exemplar research, and articulate opportunities that FSTs offer, by portraying applications to DigiVeillance at both shallow and deeper levels of treatment.

Declaration

The project, of which this article is intended as a culmination, has so far given rise to an internal working paper, and two draft papers for submission to ACIS'25. One is a Provocations Paper on 'Appropriate Research Techniques for Large-Scale IS Applying Disruptive IT', and the other a Short Paper on 'Digiveillance as a Legitimate IS Research Domain'. Together with an intended paper on 'The Use of Future Studies Techniques in eInteraction Research', targeted at the Bled eConference, these preliminary papers will be used to articulate and to test out various aspects of the paper proposed for the JIT Special Issue.

Reference List

Achterkamp M.C. & Vos J.F.J. (2008) 'Investigating the use of the stakeholder notion in project management literature, a meta-analysis' Int'l J. Project Management 26, 7 (October 2008) 749-757

Baumer E.P.S. (2015) 'Usees' Proc. 33rd Annual ACM Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'15), April 2015, at https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2702123.2702147

Berleur J. & Drumm J. (Eds.) (1991) 'Information Technology Assessment' Proc. 4th IFIP-TC9 International Conference on Human Choice and Computers, Dublin, July 8-12, 1990, Elsevier Science Publishers (North-Holland), 1991

Brennen S. & Kreiss D. (2016) 'Digitalization and Digitization' International Encyclopedia of Communication Theory and Philosophy, October 2016, PrePrint at http://culturedigitally.org/2014/09/digitalization-and-digitization/

Cecez-Kecmanovic D. (2021) 'IS Research and the making of Sociotechnical Future(s)' Keynote Address, Austral. Conf. Infor. Syst., ACIS 2021

Clarke R. (1988) 'Information Technology and Dataveillance' Commun ACM 31,5 (May 1988) 498-512, PrePrint at http://rogerclarke.com/DV/CACM88.html

Clarke R. (1992) 'Extra-Organisational Systems: A Challenge to the Software Engineering Paradigm' Proc. IFIP World Congress, Madrid, September 1992, PrePrint at http://rogerclarke.com/SOS/PaperExtraOrgSys.html

Clarke R. (2021) 'A Platform for a Pragmatic Metatheoretic Model for Information Systems Practice and Research' Proc. Austral. Conf. Infor. Syst., Sydney, December 2021, PrePrint at http://rogerclarke.com/ID/PMM.html

Clarke R. & Davison R.M. (2020) 'Through Whose Eyes? The Critical Concept of Researcher Perspective' J. Assoc. Infor. Syst. 21, 2 (March-April 2020) 483-501, PrePrint at http://rogerclarke.com/SOS/RP.html

Clarke R., Davison R.M. & Jia W. (2020) 'Researcher Perspective in the IS Discipline: An Empirical Study of Articles in the Basket of 8 Journals' Information Technology & People 33, 6 (October 2020) 1515-1541, PrePrint at http://rogerclarke.com/SOS/RPBo8.html

Davison R.M. & Schwabe G. (2025) 'The Future (As a Focus) of IS Research' Editorial, Information Systems Journal, 2025 , at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/isj.12591

Fischer-Huebner S. & Lindskog H. (2001) 'Teaching Privacy-Enhancing Technologies' Proc. IFIP WG 11.8 2nd World Conference on Information Security Education, Perth, Australia, 2001

Halicka K. (2016) 'Innovative Classification of Methods of the Future-Oriented Technology Analysis' Technological and Economic Development of Economy 22,4 (2016) 574--597, at https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/481323178.pdf

Hovorka D.S, & Mueller B. (2025) 'Speculative foresight: A foray beyond digital transformation' Information Systems Journal 35,1 (January 2025) 140-162, at https://onlinelibrary-wiley-com.virtual.anu.edu.au/doi/pdfdirect/10.1111/isj.12530?download=true

Michael M.G. & Clarke R. (2013) 'Dataveillance -- Thirty Years On', in Michael M.G. & Michael K. (2013) 'Uberveillance and the Social Implications of Microchip Implants: Emerging Technologies' IGI Global, 2013, pp.18-31, PrePrint at https://rogerclarke.com/DV/DV13.html

Mitchell R.K., Agle B.R. & Wood D.J. (1997) 'Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of Who and What Really Counts' Academy of Management Review 22, 4 (1997) 853-886

Niederman F. (2023) 'Why Future Studies Provides a Critical Opportunity for the IS Discipline' Proc. 56th Hawaii Int'l Conf. Syst. Sci., 2023, 5845-5854, at https://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/bbb90839-48f3-4f58-8f6e-a71000506c5c/content

Schlagwein D., Currie W., Leimeister J.M. & Willcocks L. (2025) 'Digital futures: Definition (what), importance (why) and methods (how)' Journal of Information Technology 40,1 (2025) 2--8

Author Affiliations

Roger Clarke is Principal of Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, Canberra. He is also a Visiting Professorial Fellow associated with UNSW Law & Justice, and a Visiting Professor in Computing in the College of Systems & Society at the Australian National University.

The content and infrastructure for these community service pages are provided by Roger Clarke through his consultancy company, Xamax. From the site's beginnings in August 1994 until February 2009, the infrastructure was provided by the Australian National University. During that time, the site accumulated close to 30 million hits. It had passed 80 million by the end of 2025. Sponsored by the Gallery, Bunhybee Grasslands, the extended Clarke Family, Knights of the Spatchcock and their drummer, and her Dr Nurse site

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Created: 6 August 2025 - Last Amended: 13 August 2025 by Roger Clarke
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