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While ethics are recognized as an integral part of information systems (IS) research, many questions about the role of ethics in research practice remain unanswered. Our report responds to this emerging set of concerns with a broad and integrative account of five perspectives on ethics in IS research and design science research (DSR) in particular. Our report is informed by a broad literature review, a panel discussion at DESRIST 2020, and substantial personal experience from wrestling with ethical considerations in the field. The report provides a comprehensive discussion of prevailing perspectives on ethics and the implications for IS research. Together, we hope the report will inspire more ethics-conscious and responsible IS research.

One of the open methodological concerns for design science research (DSR) in information systems is how to think about and deal with the notion of context. This paper takes an important step toward clarifying the notion of context and elaborates how it can be dealt with from a DSR perspective. In particular, we present a coherent theoretical account of context grounded in pragmatism. Moreover, we also reify this understanding into a context taxonomy and context framework for DSR. Altogether, we intend to provide a sound foundation and a fruitful platform for DSR that is more attuned to the particularities of context.

The digital transformation of societies has been a core concern for the information systems (IS) research community since its emergence. While most of this work has had a positive outlook, recently a stronger focus on the unintended consequences and dark side of digitalization has come to the fore. This paper contributes to this emerging stream of research by zooming in on a heretofore unrecognized question with potentially catastrophic consequences: What happens to our increasingly digitalized societies when a pro-longed blackout causes a large fraction of digital systems and services to stop working for an extended period of time? To answer this motivating question, we conducted two system dynamics-based simulation experiments to tease out how different degrees of digitalization in a society would affect the resilience of the food system in the face of two different, extreme but plausible prolonged blackout scenarios. We find that a high degree of digitalization has a strong significant negative impact on food system resilience in the investigated scenarios. In the discussion of our findings, we conceptualize “the risk of digital fragility” as the underlying driver of the observed results. Moving forward, we suggest seven mitigation strategies for the risk of digital fragility as fruitful avenues for future research.

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