The power associated to Big Tech, often equated to the ‘Big Five’ (Google, Apple, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft), is posing new problems at the societal and regulatory levels. Such problems lead to deeper questions in terms of power generation, use, and limitation, which a political philosophy perspective brings new flesh to. In this episode, we sit with Juho Lindman, whose award-winning paper "Big Tech’s power, political corporate social responsibility and regulation" interrogates questions in this range. Beyond regulation, he engages issues of political corporate responsibility and their relevance in the present international scenario.

Juho Lindman is Professor of Information Systems in the Department of Applied IT at the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and the director of the University of Gothenburg Blockchain Lab. His current research focuses on open-source software development, blockchain governance, open data, and organisational change. His paper "Big Tech’s power, political corporate social responsibility and regulation", with Jukka Mäkinen and Eero Kasanen, won the Best Paper Prize by the Journal of Information Technology in 2024.

Resources:

Lindman, J., Makinen, J., & Kasanen, E. (2023). Big Tech’s power, political corporate social responsibility and regulation. Journal of Information Technology, 38(2), 144-159. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/02683962221113596.

The recent Olympic Games and European Football Championship have highlighted once again the importance, and controversiality, of technologies associated with referee decisions. A Video Assistant Referee, or VAR, is tasked with assisting the referee concerning dubious situations in a sports game. While VAR has become part and parcel of the experience of multiple sports, including football, little is known about the complex sociotechnical fabric that plays out every single time a VAR decision is made. Today we are joined by Stan Karanasios and Bikesh Raj Upreti, respectively Associate Professor and Lecturer in the Department of Business Information Systems at the University of Queensland, who look at “addressing equivocality with technology” by means of VAR. With them, we examine the history of some glaring errors of VAR in football and use that as an entry point to discuss VAR, its genesis, and the sociotechnical profile of a technology that the many sports fans among us witness frequently.

Stan Karanasios is an Associate Professor in the Department of Business Information Systems at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland. His research focuses on how digital technology impacts organisations and society, and he has published widely on domains including fintech, the digital transformation of enterprises, and the use of social media platforms in the emergency sector. He is a Senior Editor for Information Systems Journal, an Associate Editor for the European Journal of Information Systems, Section Editor for the Australian Journal on Information Systems, and on the Editorial Board for Mind, Culture & Activity and the International Journal of Information Management.

Bikesh Raj Upreti is a Lecturer in the Department of Business Information Systems at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland. He received his PhD from Aalto University, focusing on developing applications to uncover insights from large-scale text data. He researches applied computational methods and quantitative inquiry of inter-disciplinary phenomena, and has applied such analytical tools for large-scale behavioural and predictive analytics set in Information systems, marketing, finance and political discourses.

Resources:

Karanasios, S., Upreti, B., & Iannacci, F. (2023). When Is a Goal a Goal? Addressing Equivocality with Technology. European Conference of Information Systems (ECIS), Kristiansand, 13-16 June 2023, https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2023_rip/10/.