Abstract
The notion of digital ecosystems has become a fruitful metaphor for examining the effects of digitalization across boundaries of organization, industry, lifeworld, mind, and body. In business-economic terms, the metaphor has inspired IS research into new business models, while in engineering terms, it has led to important insights into the design and governance of digital platforms. More recently, a third take is approaching digital ecosystems as literal ecological systems, reintroducing ecological thinking and the radically anti-modern philosophy it promotes into IS research. While such thinking lends itself to critiquing foundational IS categories (such as socio-technicality and externalities), it has yet to demonstrate its potential for guiding alternative practices of orchestrating digital ecosystems. In this talk, I will focus on possible avenues for developing such practices by discussing the notion of a “healthy” digital ecosystem as the primary goal of its orchestration, drawing on ecological categories such as resilience and flexibility budgets. By way of conclusion, I will then sketch the contours of IS research and practice that is more ecological and, thus, more responsive to a world increasingly marked by precarity.
Short Bio
Attila Márton is an associate professor at the Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School. His main research is in digital ecology, including the political ecology of digital ecosystems, digital labour and AI, and the sociology of digital knowledge and forgetting. He is a recipient of the AIS Early Career Award and his research is being published in leading information systems, organization studies and sociological journals.