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Working Paper of 2 August 2025
Intended for the
Provocations
Track at
ACIS'25,
and thereby limited to 8pp. / 4000 words
© Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd, 2025
Available under an AEShareNet 
licence or a Creative
Commons 
licence.
This document is at http://rogerclarke.com/DV/FSID.html
The Information Systems (IS) discipline is preoccupied with the interests of corporations rather than reflecting the richness of the stakeholder groups affected by contemporary systems. The conception of research projects, rather than addressing the needs of practitioners, is inward-looking and prioritises rigour and intellectual depth ahead of relevance, comprehensibility and implementability. The obsession with empirical rigour, combined with the slowness of research conduct, write-up and publication, lead to researchers reporting on phenomena of the past, not of the present and the near future.
On the one hand, potential, future phenomena cannot be subjected to observation, and hence it is infeasible to conduct empirical research into them. On the other hand, balanced progress demands insights into precisely those kinds of things. If the IS discipline aspires to delivering value, it needs to find a way to deliver those insights. This paper argues that two major changes are necessary for the IS discipline to rediscover its mojo:
Provocation #1: The IS discipline must regain relevance by expanding its scope to embrace near-future phenomena, and by applying futures studies research techniques to them.
Provocation #2: The IS discipline must confront the reality that large-scale IS applying disruptive IT embody intense competition among multiple stakeholders, all of whose perspectives are legitimate for researchers to adopt.
This paper puts flesh on those criticisms of contemporary IS research, outlines research techniques employed in futures studies, and illustrates their application to a domain that is rich in conflict among stakeholder interests.
A provocation is an essay that presents "critical reflection and argumentation on issues pertinent to [a] ... community ... [to] push the reader to think differently about an issue pertinent to [that community]" (Reed et al. 2024). This paper identifies two ways in which the information systems (IS) discipline has lost its way, and as a result has become increasingly less relevant, less interesting and less likely to flourish.
The contemporary context of the IS discipline is radically different from that which prevailed during the first half of its existence, viz. 1965-95. During that period, the focus shifted from 'data processing' to support records management, to 'information systems' to support management planning and control, and then 'decision support systems' to serve the needs of executives. IT applications then escaped the confines of a single organisation and serve pairs, chains and networks of organisations (Clarke & Wigan 2018). Many systems are extra-organisational (Clarke 1992a), in that individuals are direct participants, not only as employees, but also as consumers and citizens. Most data is 'born digital', the scale of data-holdings is massive, and the scramble for competitive advantage from it borders on the frantic (Piccoli & Watson 2008). Digitisation has spawned digitalisation, whereby interpretation and management of the world is now far less through human perception and cognition, and instead heavily dependent on computer-performed manipulation of digital data (Brennen & Kreiss 2016).
In the second quarter of the 21st century, IT-based systems generate new data by drawing inferences from available data and models, and are delegated the power to make decisions. They increasingly act directly in the real world, and with increasing degrees of autonomy. This is accompanied by decreasing degrees of transparency, exacerbated by the uncontrolled application of machine-learning forms of artificial intelligence (AI/ML) and Generative AI, which deliver inferences, decisions and even actions based on data alone, devoid of rationale.
The scale and scope of functions that are supported, combined with the transformational and disruptive impacts of IT applications, mean that no organisation is free to make decisions as it sees fit, solely in pursuit of its own interests. IS generally involve a great many stakeholders, their interests differ and conflict, many direct conflicts among interests arise, and some stakeholders are subject to substantial negative impacts. Simplistic cost-benefit trade-off analyses are a thing of the past.
Given the magnitude of the changes, it is untenable to cling to the approaches and traditions that served the discipline's practitioners during the formative years. Yet this is what we have done. From a methodological perspective, commitment to empirical research in a world of rapidly-changing phenomena condemns the IS discipline to having limited relevance to the world in which organisations now operate. Section 2 identifies ontological and epistemological assumptions that are no longer appropriate in a rapidly-changing environment. Section 3 considers the methodological implications, and outlines futures studies techniques that enable contributions to be made in conditions where the assumptions of empiricism do not hold.
In section 4, an axiological perspective is adopted. IS researchers generally demonstrate a strong commitment to the values of corporate board-rooms, and to treatment of other value-sets as being constraints on the achievement of corporate objectives. This results in inadequately narrow research domains, and condemn the IS discipline to having limited relevance to the contemporary world, in which the varied and conflicting interests of multiple stakeholders need to be taken into account. In section 5, a research domain that is to date unfashionable in IS is used to illustrate the additional scope offered by future studies research techniques and greater flexibility in researchers' perspectives.
Empiricism involves "primary reliance on evidence derived from observation, investigation, or experiment [ of or in the real world ] rather than on abstract reasoning, theoretical analysis, or speculation" (OED 6). For five centuries, the practice of knowledge-seeking has placed great emphasis on the application of disciplined imagination to empirical data (data gained by "direct observation, investigation, or experiment [of a perceived reality]", OED 3), and comparison of the results of exercises in disciplined imagination against new, purposefully-collected empirical data. This has resulted in theories about the real world that have had sufficient explanatory and predictive power to enable accumulations in many fields in both knowledge and standard of living.
To frame the argument presented below, it is necessary to go one level deeper into the underpinnings of IS theory. "Researchers and practitioners alike unavoidably make 'metatheoretic assumptions', often implicitly, and sometimes consciously. Where the assumption is not merely conscious, but is also intentional, the term 'metatheoretic commitments' is appropriate" (Clarke 2021b, p.2. See also Johnson & Duberley 2003). Metatheory relevant to the present discussion draws on four branches of philosophy: ontology (concerned with existence), epistemology (concerned with knowledge), methodology (concerned with processes) and axiology (concerned with value). In Table 1, metatheoretic assumptions discussed in this paper are organised into those four branches.
A set of pragmatic ontological assumptions is proposed in Clarke (2021b) as being mainstream in IS practice. One is that real-world phenomena comprise relatively stable 'things' and inherently dynamic 'events'. Properties of phenomena (such as the wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, hardness and brittleness of things, and the duration of events) provide a basis for categorising them into particular groups. Ideas (such as numbers, colours, hardness, brittleness and time), on the other hand, are notions within the abstract world of data and models. Phenomena are assumed to be observable by humans or artefacts produced by humans. They are also treated as being reasonably consistent across space, and reasonably stable across time. These form items 1-4 of Table 1.
Pragmatic epistemological assumptions include that 'codified knowledge' exists in the form of "data expressed and recorded in a more or less formal language ... that is disembodied from individuals, but communicable among them" and that 'tacit knowledge' "exists only in the mind and/or body of a particular person, is informal and intangible, and hence is not readily communicated to others" (Clarke 2021b, p.3). Items 5-6 in Table 1 contains the assumptions that data can be generated more or less directly from observations of phenomena, and that the resulting data bears a reliable relationship with some aspect of real-world phenomena.
On the basis of the first six assumptions in Table 1, it can be readily argued that scientific research methods can be applied (item 7). For instrumentalist rather than merely descriptive and predictive purposes, it is also necessary for the behaviour of the phenomena to be subject to influence by actions of humans and artefacts. The axioliogical assumptions, 8-10, are discussed in section 4.
These assumptions have become engrained, to the point that they are seldom-discussed. Some fields that are not amenable to empirical science have been clearly delineated. A prominent example is those that deal in propositions that are not refutable through observation of the real world. Popper (1959, 1968) argued that such fields as religion and spirituality are incompatible with scientific method. That truce has been welcomed among devotees of science, and particularly by those who are both scientists and believers.
Many other fields in which one or more of the assumptions in Table 1 are invalid are of limited interest to practitioners of the sciences. Fantasy is applied in many contexts, in the spoken word, in written text, in sound, in still and moving imagery, and in applications of them to games. The activities of producing, promoting and selling those formats and their applications, and the artefacts and the mechanics of their operation, are real-world artefactual phenomena, and suitable subject-matter for empirical research. The imaginary worlds created by such applications and their users, on the other hand, are less commonly regarded as being real-world phenomena and hence not proper subjects for empirical research.
The subliminal nature of the assumptions inherent in empirical research is such that it is very easy for researchers to overlook circumstances in which they do not hold. An example of an anomaly in mainstream social science research arises in the context of the assumption that phenomena are reliably observable. Many data-gathering techniques, such as surveys, interviews and focus groups, depend on what people indicate (by mark, or by written or spoken word) that they did, do, will do or would do, and implicitly assume that the resulting data is a reliable proxy for what the subjects did, do, will do or would do. Various controls are possible, and various qualifications may be expressed in relation to the reliability of the proxy data; but the value of the research output is nonetheless undermined to the extent that the phenomena (the human behaviours) are inconsistent with the indications that research subjects provide. This weakness is compounded by the mainstream practice of relying on Likert-scale data gathered in survey forms on nominal rather than ordinal scales, and embodying variable interpretations and uncontrollable collection biases, which are then inappropriately processed using powerful statistical techniques (Bishop & Herron 2015).
Another challenge arises in domains in which a real world exists, but the key assumption of observability of the phenomena is unjustified. Examples of phenomena that, at any given point in human history, are unobservable include those undetectable by human senses, including very, very small things and highly ephemeral phenomena. That was once the case with some of the sound spectrum, much of the electromagnetic spectrum, and gravitational, magnetic and radioactive phenomena. Some animals have sensory capabilities that humans do not. A variety of additional categories of hitherto undetected phenomena have been postulated. It would be very brave to assert that contemporary humankind has discovered and mastered every form of phenomena, and the means of observing them and generating data from them. For example, science and engineering continue to grapple with challenges in nuclear fission, nuclear fusion and plasma, particularly in interstellar space.
This article is concerned with research about a particular category of world. The innovativeness of the human race is such that imagining the future as 'the same as now, just a little different' is a forlorn hope. The rapidity of technologically-driven and technologically-enabled change is such that there is a pressing need for research into near-future phenomena, by which is meant phenomena that it is reasonably anticipated may, soon exist, but presently do not. These are by definition not observable and not influencable, yet. Further, given the common experience of change being progressive, rather than future states coming into existence all at once, in a mature form, near-future phenomena may well also fail the consistency and stability assumptions.
At any given time, particular kinds of technologically-driven and -enabled change will be in public focus, or in laboratories, transitioning from dreams to experiments and pilots. A few that are evident at the time of writing are yet more forms of electronic commerce and electronic value-storage and -transmission, applications of quantum computing, new features of wearable computing, and various forms and uses of human-implanted computing-and-communications. A later section of this paper considers emergent digiveillance.
The study of future worlds may be supported by some mainstream research techniques that have served well in contexts in which the assumptions of empiricism are reasonable. For example, research subjects may be asked to role-play, and then respond to survey questions, contribute to focus groups, or participate in experiments. Some doubt exists, however, about the rigour with which such techniques can be applied to role-players, and the usefulness of the resulting data. The following section identifies relevant research techniques that are at best adjacent to the empirical tradition, or fall outside it.
A wide range of techniques have been applied to research into future worlds. Early notions of trends, and forecasting by projecting statistical data along a timeline to postulate future time-series data, suffer from the confusion of correlation with causality, and make implicit assumptions about underlying stability of both processes and the environment in which they occurred.
Various forms of modelling proved more useful, initially in the econometric arena, but challenges of complexity and obscurity need to be addressed, and suitable concepts and constructs discovered or invented. Generally, modelling makes assumptions, often only implicitly, about some kinds of at least second-order stability. Even modelling that featured multi-layer feedback loops could not fulfil all needs (Forrester 1961). Gradually, acceptance emerged of less quantitative approaches, and there was increased focus on discontinuities (Drucker 1968) or shifts, shocks and divergence (Toffler 1970, 1980). For a more recent view of relevant research methods, see Glenn & Gordon (2009).
This section provides a brief overview of research techniques, listed in Table 2, that have at least some reasonable degree of recognition within the IS discipline, commencing with conceptual research, and encompassing various forms of quasi-empirical techniques, business case development, and risk and impact assessment tools.
In the absence of a real world that can be subjected to observation, it is common to resort to 'conceptual research' or 'arm-chair reasoning'. When undertaking such work, there is a dire risk of drifting far into speculation. This occurs in works of fiction, most spectacularly, but also most valuably, in the 'sci-fi' genre. It is also evident in some inadequately-grounded work in the social sciences. Drawing on work of Rob Kling, I coined the expression 'instrumentalist futurism' to refer to categories of conceptual research that appear capable of delivering informational value (Clarke 1997b). One such approach has been described as 'visionary depiction' (Kling & Lamb 1997). A description of an imagined future is commonly 'utopian' (strongly emphasing 'good' aspects), sometimes 'dystopian' (strongly emphasing 'bad' aspects), and occasionally balanced, ambivalent or intentionally ambiguous.
Utopian descriptions abound. Examples of the primarily dystopian form of 'visionary depiction', applied in a surveillance society context, include analyses of the impacts of the imposed digital persona (Clarke 1994a), of chip-based ID cards (Clarke 1997a), and more recently of AI applications Clarke (2022). However, a great many examples can be found, across many disciplines. An example of a 'balanced' 'visionary depiction' of a static future situation, in this case of university administrative computing, is in Clarke (1992b). (This was a 10-years-ahead snapshot, written overnight for a university committee, shortly before the availability of the Internet for other-than-research, and 6 months before I became aware of, and shifted my focus to, the then-not-quite-usable World Wide Web).
A related technique, with an express 'agenda', is critical theory research. This directly addresses the value-conflict challenge, by recognising the effects of power, and the tendency of some stakeholders' interests to dominate those of other stakeholders (Myers 1997, Alvesson & Deetz 2000, Cecez-Kezmanovic 2005).
Conceptual research can offer a great deal of value, provided that writers and readers all remember that all propositions are of necessity speculative and untested. It can provide what might be termed 'bootstrap hypotheses', which fall somewhere between 'ad hoc hypotheses' and 'theory-based hypotheses'. It can also underpin the development of research frameworks, which provide structure to themes and issues, including descriptions of fundamental concepts and processes, and of research agendas, which combine a broad conceptual framework, a process model, a set of broad research questions and a research program whereby those broad questions can be further articulated and addressed (Wand & Weber 2002, Ahuja 2002, Avgerou 2008, Newell & Marabelli 2015, Clarke 2019).
Beyond conceptual research approaches, a second cluster can be reasonably described as quasi-empirical techniques. This term has been used in methodological commentaries in several disciplines, but with various meanings. It is used here to refer to synthetic data that resembles empirical data, or is seemingly but not actually representative of real-world phenomena. The techniques considered under this category commence with some more or less formalised model of current circumstances, and some degree of appreciation of the nature of a new technology (including its features and intended impacts, and perhaps even of its more apparent affordances). They then postulate the effects that the technological intervention might have, based on previously-observed or theorised processes of political economy, and of social and psychological behaviour. By utilising such empirical base as is available, and placing constraints on the speculative component, the outcomes are less likely to be 'flights of fancy', and more likely to deliver value to the analysis team, system sponsors , and society as a whole. Examples of such techniques are:
Scenarios analysis is much-used technique, involving the development of a set of story-lines. The value derives from a combination of the depth of insights achieved within each scenario, together with the diversity among the different scenarios' paths of development. It is discussed at length in relation to the digital surveillance economy in Clarke (2019). An individual scenario may be developed forwards in time starting with a present (or perhaps hypothesised) state, applying some postulated contextual and/or strategic changes together with known or postulated dynamic patterns (environmental, economic, social and/or political, depending on the context), and inferring what further changes would occur over time. An alternative approach, referred to as 'backcasting', involves postulating a future state (often one that is highly desirable or highly undesirable), and proposing actions (e.g. decisions, changes, and interventions) that would be needed in order to result in transition from the present to the future state (Bibri 2020).
There are also well-established organisation-internal techniques that are much-used in individual business enterprises and government agencies, including:
Business-case and RA techniques are myopic, in that they are dedicated to the interests of a single player, with interests of other stakeholders ignored or marginalised, except where they are perceived as threatening the primary player's interests, e.g. through non-adoption, active resistance or even countermeasures. That weakness is serious and even fatal, at least for the purposes of the present discussion. The scope may exist for refining RA, however, in order to deliver an effective Multi-Stakeholder Risk Assessment (MSRA) technique (Clarke & Michael 2024).
Finally there are techniques, widely used in public policy contexts, that are loosely referred to as 'impact assessment'. These evidence multiple flavours, depending on the degree of emphasis on a technology, a project, the impacts, or compliance with particular regulatory requirements. The techniques include:
All of these techniques are applied in other disciplines. In order to address the pressing need for research into near-future phenomena, their use in IS needs to be greatly expanded. Sections 2 and 3 have together provided supporting information for:
Provocation #1: The IS discipline must regain relevance by expanding its scope to embrace near-future phenomena, and by applying futures studies research techniques to them.
The following section addresses the three remaining Key Assumptions in Table 1, which relate to the value-sets that are evident in most reported IS research and lead to Provocation #2. That is followed by illustrative information in support of the two Provocations, provided by considering a particular research domain in which its is essential both to apply future studies research techniques, and to reflect the interests of all stakeholders.
The term axiology was coined early in the 20th century to refer to a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature and classification of value and how value is imputed to things (Hart 1971). The sense of 'values' is broad, encompassing at least individual, social, economic and environmental aspects. "The ethicist approach considers value on what might be called a 'virtue' dimension of 'good / bad'. Arguments also exist for a 'deontic' approach, i.e. related to duty or obligation, on a 'mandated / optional / forbidden' dimension ... The term 'utility' is concerned with impacts or outcomes. The notion of 'teleology' has to do with purpose, and 'consequentialism' with the proposition that an action must be evaluated on the basis of its impacts or outcomes in relation to purpose" (Clarke 2021b, p.4). See SEP (2024).
In the private sector, the values of shareholders have always been the primary focus. The notion of 'stakeholders' (Freeman & Reed 1983) was created as a counterpoint to shareholders, to refer to participants in the process or intervention, in such roles as investor, data source, technology provider, system sponsor and user (Seddon et al. 1999). Some categories of entity can have an interest in an IS despite not being direct participants (Pouloudi & Whitley 1997, p.3). The term 'usees' is descriptive of such parties (Berleur & Drumm 1991 p.388, Clarke 1992a, Fischer-Huebner & Lindskog 2001, Baumer 2015).
In section 1, attention was drawn to the massive impact of transformational and disruptive IT. Threads in computation, data management, communications, robotics, data analytics, data manipulation, data creation, and materials creation, have matured, and have interwoven. With each phase, the impactfulness has broadened and deepened. Yet the IS discipline remains stuck in a time-warp, acting as though decisions about an IS were an organisation-internal matter and there were limited external effects and the interests of external stakeholders were of little importance. With inter- and extra-organisational IS now the norm, multiple stakeholders exist, many have legitimacy, some have power, they have conflicting objectives, value-sets clash, and a whole range of public policy issues arises. Boards, IS practitioners, and the IS discipline, have no choice but to adapt to the new world of public responsibility as a substantial constraint on the freedom of choice of corporate and governmment executives.
An enabler of the necessary adaptation is the researcher perspective extension of stakeholder theory advanced in Clarke & Davison (2020) and Clarke et al. 2020). This observes that about 90% of IS research adopts the perspective of a single entity, and in about 90% of that 90%, that entity is the system sponsor. Table 1 lists this as axiological assumption 8. Single-perspective research that prioritises the interests of some other stakeholder is much less common, but it appears in small quantities in many IS journals, and hence is not regarded by the discipline as illegitimate (assumption 9). Dual-perspective research (e.g. balancing the interests of both entities within a dyad, such as employer and employees) is consistent with the enablement of win-win relationships, but is methodologically challenging. Multi-perspective research is a fit to networked industry sectors, and more broadly to economies, societies and polities in which the interests of many players are interwoven. In such contexts, it is very difficult to achieve the standards of rigour demanded by A and A* journals, and hence very little such research is reported in the IS literature. That gives rise to axiological assumption 10.
The author's contention is that the current situation in which system sponsors' interests dominate IS research is both ethically challlenged, and an untenable position for the IS discipline to sustain in the contemporary world of continual waves of transformational and disruptive IT leading to IS being highly impactful on the interests of large numbers of stakeholders. This leads to the second proposition advanced in this paper:
Provocation #2: The IS discipline must confront the reality that large-scale IS applying disruptive IT embody intense competition among multiple stakeholders, all of whose perspectives are legitimate for researchers to adopt.
In section 2 and Table 1, characteristics were identified of research domains that are poorly served by empirical research techniques. Examples of such domains were suggested as being electronic value-storage and -transmission, quantum computing, wearable computing, and human-implanted computing-and-communications. This section considers one such domain, in order to illustrate how futures studies techniques can deliver at least insights, and preferably usable guidance to IS practitioners, and do so in the context of public responsibility outlined in the preceding paragraph.
The domain of digiveillance has been selected because it is a current area of considerable importance that builds on prior technological phases relating to physical surveillance and particularly the era of dataveillance c.1980-2020. A major shift us under way, arising from the digitisation of almost all data and the strong movement in business and government towards digitalisation. It is an arena that features rapidly evolving forms of technological intervention, near-future phenomena, and culturally variable attitudes and adoption patterns, and hence instability and even volatility. Further, digiveillance creates the prospect of very substantial impacts on economy, society and polity, effects on many stakeholders, and considerable intensity in a range of public policy issues.
Surveillance is the systematic investigation or monitoring of the actions or communications of one or more persons. Monitoring has become pervasive and intensive. Data about each individual's interests, attitudes and past and current actions are available to powerful institutions, emabling organisations to draw inferences about each individual's potential future actions, and to do so without reference to the individuals themselves.
Living in a society pervaded by surveillance makes non-conformism risky, even perilous. The suppression of behaviour that powerful organisations perceive as being 'deviant' may (but may not) have positive benefits such as lower levels of some kinds of violent crime. On the other hand, it leads to stasis not only in politics -- as powerful institutions probably intend -- but also in social and cultural matters, and even in economic terms. This is because innovation depends on new and risky ideas being articulated, and acted upon. Studies of surveillance society are conducted through lenses offered by theories of political science, sociology, psychology, and various applied social sciences. See, for example, Foucault (1977), Marx (1985), Gandy (1989), Lyon (1994, 2001, 2007), and the journal 'Surveillance & Society'.
An approach suitable for adoption in the IS discipline is to examine the ways in which the implementation of information technologies that deliver surveillance are viewed as interventions into social processes. Despite this, surveillance is largely ignored by IS researchers. For example, of >18,000 refereed articles in the AIS eLibrary in July 2025, a search for the term in Titles found only 12 items (half of them in the 4 years 2021-24), and a search in Abstracts only 29 (14 in 2021-24). The articles of relevance mostly took theoretical and/or conventionally empirical approaches, with just one applying any of the future studies techniques identified in section 3. The exception was a teaching case relating to city-residents (Avery 2022). Of the >18,000, 2000 were in the professional society's journal, Communications (CAIS). Searches in that sub-set located 1 in Title (Avery 2022) and 5 in Abstract. On the other hand, a number of those papers did adopt a researcher perspective other than that of the system sponsor, in most cases with the interests of workplace participants or patients in focus.
Surveillance has been conducted for millennia in a physical context, by spatial, visual and aural monitoring. Increasingly over the centuries, technological means have been developed to augment the human senses of sight and hearing. Surveillance of electronic communications emerged very shortly after the introduction of the telegraph in the 1840s, and expanded dramatically with telephone technology from the late 19th century, and digital data networks from the mid-20th century onwards. Although the various forms of surveillance may be of legitimate interest in IS research, they are not central to it, until and unless the results of the monitoring are recorded as data. That has been the case for the last couple of centuries, however, and the application of dataveillance exploded during the last two decades of the 20th century and the first two decades of the 21st.
In what now seems a simpler age, I coined the term 'dataveillance', in Clarke (1986), to refer to "the systematic monitoring of people's actions or communications through the application of information technology" (Clarke 1988). Key motivations underlying the adoption of dataveillance included the replacement of costly and unreliable human watchers by inexpensive and reliable artefacts, a considerable increase in capabilities and reach, the ready storability of captured data, and hence the ability to conduct retrospective analysis, and the ready transmissibility of captured data, and hence the conduct of surveillance 'in real time' and the prompt pursuit of deviants and even the interdiction of undesirable actions.
Beyond these rational drivers, the rate of adoption of dataveillance by organisations has been driven by the technological imperative ('we can, therefore we must') and by the marketing / fashion / bandwagon imperative ('the salesman says it can, and that everyone else is doing it; so it must be true, and we must do it too'). Mindless and largely unregulated adoption has enabled authoritarian regimes to sustain their power over the populace, in many cases using technologies developed and sold to them by advanced countries of the 'global north'. Meanwhile, even hitherto free nations have been sleepwalking their way into surveillance society (Clarke 2001a).
Since the mid 1980s, it has been necessary to further articulate the basic notion of dataveillance to encompass the digital persona (Clarke 1994a, 2014), person location and tracking (Clarke 2001), biometric identification, and the imposition of identifiers (Clarke 1994b) in such forms as chip-embedment in human-carried artefacts (such as mobile phones and anklets) and human-carrying artefacts (such as cars). Chip-embedment directly into people commenced soon after its use in animals, during the late 1990s (Michael & Michael 2009).
Around the turn of the 21st century, 'experiential surveillance' abruptly arrived. Longstanding arrangements had existed whereby printed books and tickets to events were purchased using anonymous cash, printed books were read in private, and audiences watched and listened to human speakers, live and via recordings, without needing to disclose who they were. In just a short period, reading, watching and listening were converted from unidentified and unrecorded activities using 'analogue' artefacts, to recorded and identified activities dependent on 'digital' services. Key elements in this change have been card-based payments; online-only ticketing; and activity-monitoring in Kindle-style products and on web-sites for text, audio and video. Location and tracking gave rise to the aphorism 'you are where you've been' (Clarke & Wigan 2011). That has been joined by 'you are what you've been reading, listening to, and watching'.
Another development has been an explosion in 'auto-surveillance', that is to say 'of the self, by the self' (i.e. nothing to do with cars). Once-private diary-entries are now published on blogs and gifted to or expropriated by walled-garden 'social media' venues and other tech platforms. Other means of self-exposure include FitBit-style activity-monitoring, v(ideo-)logging, and mobile-device-carriage, commonly with promiscuous location settings, resulting in the term 'the quantified self' (Lupton 2016). The notion of überveillance, in particular through implanted chips, has been investigated in depth by Michael & Michael (2013).
Some of the impacts of auto-surveillance are beneficial, some are innocuous, and some are very harmful. The panopticon effect, be it of Bentham (1791) or Foucault (1977), involves the watched never being sure when the focus of the watcher's gaze is on them. When powerful organisations (e.g. social welfare agencies, licensing agencies, employers) are known to utilise the available data to target penalties at deviants, a widespread, self-disciplinary 'chilling effect' arises. Depending on the context and the observer's worldview, it may be anywhere between highly desirable and highly undesirable that intentional acts by one party have a strong deterrent effect on behaviours of other parties (Schauer 1978, Penney 2016).
A further relevant notion is omni- or supra-surveillance, which refers to the coordinated use of multiple channels of surveillance data. Yet another is 'sousveillance' -- literally, monitoring from beneath / sous, rather than from above / sur (Mann et al. 2003). In this case, 'the watched watch the watchers'. One somewhat idealistic example involves installing cameras in CCTV-monitoring rooms, training them on the people monitoring the screens, and streaming the resulting video out into the public Internet (Brin 1998). A more familiar instance is the use of wearcams by demonstrators, to transmit and store video of the behaviour of police (Mann 1997). This gives rise to the idea of 'equiveillance', that is to say a balance between authoritarian and democratic use of monitoring technologies (Mann 2005).
This brief overview is sufficient to suggest that digitisation and digitalisation are deepening the entrenchment of powerful and impactful forms of digiveillance, and greatly intensifying the experience of surveillance society, with potentially very serious consequences for the next generations of people. If researchers wait until these technological interventions into society have already occurred, by which time changed or new phenomena will be available for observation, the damage will already have been done.
Human society is in the process of losing the ability to choose its futures because it is permitting digiveillance technologies, and the powerful institutions that develop and deploy them, to dictate society's directions. If the public is to retain scope to influence the emergent high-tech, corporatised-government State heralded in Schmidt & Cohen (2014), the 'precautionary principle' needs to be applied. This places the onus on proponents of interventions to demonstrate that the potential impacts are justified and proportionate (Wingspread 1998).
This section has argued that the digiveillance society is a research domain that is both very important and of legitimate interest to IS researchers -- despite the attention paid to it to date having been minimal. Where IS researchers place value on relevance, what research techniques can they use in order to gather understanding in advance about the possible impacts of technological interventions? Table 3 offers a sampler of research questions in the digiveillance space, in each case a with suggestions as to which of the research techniques listed in Table 2 could contribute to the generation of answers.
This section has considered one particular research domain in which IS practitioners and people active on public policy issues need information that cannot be delivered by empirical research techniques, and that features serous conflicts among the interests of the various stakeholders. It has thereby provided illustrative information in support of both Provocations. The application of futures studies techniques enables researchers to deliver at least insights, and perhaps more concrete assistance. I contend that such research falls within the scope of the IS discipline, and that IS researchers need to overcome their reticence, adopt a far broader conception of the field of view and the players and interests involved. It can thereby deliver relevance with such rigour as is achievable, rather than remaining wedded to narrow and fixed notions of rigour that render the outputs of research largely valueless to society.
This paper has advanced the propositions that:
Provocation #1: The IS discipline must regain relevance by expanding its scope to embrace near-future phenomena, and by applying futures studies research techniques to them
Provocation #2: The IS discipline must confront the reality that large-scale IS applying disruptive IT embody intense competition among multiple stakeholders, all of whose perspectives are legitimate for researchers to adopt.
The IS discipline is at risk of passing beyond the stage of ossification towards stasis. To recover the vibrancy that it once exhibited, its scope must be rapidly extended to futures studies of policy-ridden domains. It needs the boldness to seek relevance, and risk-manage the impacts on rigour.
[ Anything more from http://www.rogerclarke.com/DV/FSSS.html#Impl ? ]
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The genesis of this paper was a challenge posed to me by Fred Niederman of St Louis University Missouri. I greatly appreciated the challenge, the ensuing discussions and his suggestions about the ideas it contains.
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.
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