Andreas Georg Scherer, University of Zurich

Peter Bloom, University of Essex

Cristina Neesham, Newcastle University

Yuan Li, Saint Mary's College of California

The purpose of this Special Issue is to examine the ongoing transformations of democratic societies by analyzing the political and ideological projects that position themselves against liberal democracy—be they postliberalism, (techno-)feudalism, (tech-)fascism, and other variants of illiberalism. It investigates the evolving roles of the state, executive power, digital technologies, media industries, social movements, and other non-state actors, while questioning how the moral and political responsibilities of business must be redefined amid democratic backsliding. The emerging illiberal context is marked by exclusionary practices, the erosion of participatory and deliberative norms, the refusal to recognize legitimate actors and positions, assertions of absolute truths, the rise of transgressive publics and politics, and sustained attacks on democratic institutions. While preserving the appearance of democratic legitimacy, these practices in effect consolidate a more illiberal and authoritarian form of democratic order.

Business enterprises are not merely bystanders in this process of replacing liberal democracy; they are among its principal architects. The corporate consolidation of communication platforms, the privatization of data and public discourse, and the fusion of financial and technological authority have blurred the boundaries between market and state. Platform companies have become de facto sovereign actors, shaping the flow of information, public deliberation, and even electoral outcomes. Surveillance capitalism transforms human experience itself into a raw material for prediction and control. The result is a system in which democratic citizenship is gradually replaced by managed participation and algorithmic modulation of behavior. What emerges is not the totalitarianism of the past but an illiberal order in which formal democratic procedures coexist with substantive autocracy.

Business ethics, as a field, must respond to this epochal shift. For decades, business ethics and corporate responsibility research have operated within the horizon of liberal democracy, assuming markets as embedded in legal and moral frameworks that guarantee pluralism and deliberation. Yet this assumption no longer holds. The rise of far-right movements, illiberal governments, and corporate-state alliances challenges the moral premises upon which much of business ethics has been built. The discipline can no longer treat democracy as a stable background condition but must confront the ways in which business practices and technological infrastructures actively participate in the reconfiguration of power.

This Special Issue addresses the political foundations of business ethics. It calls for new theoretical and empirical research that examines how the moral assumptions of capitalism intersect with the dynamics of authoritarianism. The goal is not to conflate capitalism with fascism or illiberalism but to investigate how certain corporate and managerial logics—efficiency, obedience, unity, the valorization of strong leadership—can, under specific historical conditions, align with the political and affective structures of illiberal ideologies. The contemporary proliferation of conspiratorial thinking, anti-intellectualism, and technocratic fatalism is not external to business but often reproduced within its organizational culture and discourse. By bringing illiberal perspectives into analytical focus, the issue invites reflection on the dark side of corporate modernity and the complicity of economic institutions in the moral crises of democracy.

Business Ethics Quarterly has been a central venue for research on how corporations wield forms of authority with implications for democratic governance – be it political CSR, stakeholder engagement, or corporate citizenship. However, this research has largely assumed the persistence of broadly liberal-democratic institutional conditions in which dialogue, participation, and deliberation remain viable. The Special Issue addresses the reality that such assumptions can no longer be taken for granted and therefore focuses on postliberalism, technofeudalism, and resurgent authoritarianism to extend existing frameworks toward a more critical theory of the firm under conditions of eroding democracies. Recent scholarship on digital governance and organized immaturity provides a crucial foundation for rethinking corporate power in the contemporary political landscape, demonstrating how digital infrastructures generate new forms of dependency, opacity, and behavioral modulation that undermine the epistemic capacities required for democratic participation – not only in markets but in public life more generally.

The Special Issue brings together adjacent yet still separate bodies of literature—such as political CSR, legitimacy theory, digital ethics, and historical or comparative analyses of corporate-state entanglement—to examine the role of business and technology in the broader shift toward illiberal forms of governance. The aim is to engage scholars from business ethics, management, law, political theory, sociology, philosophy, and media studies, to examine the intersection of business, illiberalism, and erosion of democracy. The scope is deliberately broad, unified by a concern with the moral and institutional transformations of capitalism under illiberalism. Normative analyses should examine corporate legitimacy and political responsibility, asking how firms should act when democratic institutions weaken or when economic success depends on alignment with illiberal regimes. Conceptual and theoretical work may seek to reinterpret categories such as fascism, authoritarianism, technocracy, and postliberalism in ways that make them analytically relevant for business ethics. Empirical and organizational research may investigate policies and practices through which firms either resist or reproduce authoritarian tendencies, such as their use of surveillance and algorithmic management, their political lobbying and media influence, or their role in financing and normalizing illiberal movements. Comparative and historical studies can trace continuities between the corporate strategies of interwar fascism and the political economy of the present, while critical interpretive work can analyze ideological vocabularies—such as meritocracy, disruption, or technocracy—that lend moral credibility to authoritarian capitalism.

Potential topics

• Corporate–state alliances in illiberal or hybrid regimes
• Technological infrastructures of authoritarianism and/or technocratic power (surveillance, algorithmic governance, platform monopolies)
• Corporate influence on public spheres, media ecosystems, and democratic deliberation
• Historical lessons from business involvement in interwar fascism
• Postliberal and technocratic ideologies shaping contemporary corporate governance
• Political CSR under conditions of eroding/decaying democracy
• Organizational culture, leadership, and the normalization of authoritarian values
• Moral agency, dissent, and resistance inside firms against illiberal corporatism
• How do contemporary corporate policies and practices contribute to authoritarian consolidation, postliberal governance, and illiberal forms of democracy?
• In what ways do managerial logics (efficiency, obedience, strong leadership) intersect with authoritarian or proto-fascist political ideologies?
• How do digital platforms function as political actors shaping public discourse, identity formation, and democratic norms?
• What forms of corporate complicity or resistance emerge in contexts of rising identity politics, far-right populism, disinformation, and illiberal governance?
• How should business ethics reconceptualize corporate political responsibility when liberal-democratic assumptions no longer hold?
• How do illiberal ideologies such as postliberalism, technofeudalism, cyberlibertarianism, or nationalist capitalism reconfigure corporate legitimacy?
• How do autocratic leaders and change agents use rhetorical tropes, arguments, and symbols to make meaning and influence a reality, to enact crises or states of emergency, and to construct a boundary between 'us' and 'them'?
• What normative frameworks can guide responsible corporate behavior under conditions of weakened institutions, captured states, or authoritarian drift?

Timeline

• Invalid DateTime: Publication
• October 30, 2026: Pre-submission development online workshop application deadline
• November 26, 2026: Pre-submission development online workshop convenes
• April 30, 2027: Manuscripts submission deadline

Hemant Bhargava, University of California, Davis

Andreas König, University of Passau

Jan Krämer, University of Passau

Chayanin Wipusanawan, University of Passau

One of the central features of the contemporary digital economy is the growing importance of digital platforms that enable, facilitate, govern, and increasingly mediate exchanges and interactions among participants who affiliate with the platform. Digital platform ecosystems, comprising platform owners, complementors, users, and a broader network of partners and institutions, have become a dominant architecture for value creation in the global economy. They influence organizational strategies, reshape industries and markets, and generate far-reaching social and political implications.

While platform ecosystems can foster novel forms of innovation, coordination, and entrepreneurial opportunity, their concentrated influence also raises critical questions regarding their powerful, and sometimes problematic, effects on societal processes and structures that extend beyond business and economic outcomes. As platform-mediated activities now govern substantial parts of how individuals work, communicate, access information, and participate in public debate, it is increasingly important to examine how these ecosystems are designed, governed, and regulated, and how such governance arrangements shape societal outcomes.

This influence is particularly visible in evolving labor arrangements, the organization and boundaries of online speech and content moderation, and the protection of vulnerable users, including youth safety and digital well-being. Related concerns include issues of fairness and transparency, market power and competitive dynamics, data practices and privacy, the distribution of risks and benefits across stakeholder groups, and the interaction of platform governance with public policy.

This special issue aims to provide a scholarly forum for addressing critical questions on digital platform ecosystems, considering both their enabling potential and their societal risks. We welcome theoretical and empirical contributions, employing quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-methods approaches, from the full breadth of the information systems field and related disciplines.

Potential topics

• Platform Governance and Ecosystem Orchestration: Governance mechanisms, rule-setting, boundary resources, and the allocation of decision rights across platform owners, complementors, and users; centralized, decentralized, and hybrid governance models.
• Strategic Conduct, Market Power, and Competitive Dynamics: Strategic positioning, platform envelopment, self-preferencing, lock-in, multi-homing, and the implications of dominant platforms for competition and market structure.
• Innovation, Complementor Dynamics, and Value Co-creation: Generativity, innovation governance, API and data access, developer relations, incentive structures, and strategies for value creation and capture across ecosystem participants.
• Content Governance, Speech, and Public Discourse: Content moderation, recommender systems, platform policies, and their effects on online speech, civic participation, and political communication across jurisdictions.
• Societal Risks, Safety, and Equity: Fairness, inclusion, and distributional effects of platform governance and algorithmic decision-making; information integrity and the maintenance of digital trust; safety, well-being, and protection of vulnerable users.
• Regulation, Policy, and Institutional Change: Antitrust and platform regulation, interoperability and portability, liability regimes, standards, oversight of platform policies and algorithmic systems, and the interaction between platform governance and public policy.
• Platforms and Socio-Economic Development: Platformization trajectories, local innovation ecosystems, informal economies, and societal impacts in emerging and developing contexts.

Timeline

• July 1, 2026: Open for submissions
• December 1, 2026: Submission deadline

Christian Bartelheimer, University of Göttingen

Daniel Beverungen, Paderborn University

Sara Hofmann, University of Agder

Lysanne Lessard, University of Ottawa

Digital transformation continues to reshape how organizations create, deliver, and capture value. At the same time, service has become a crucial lens for understanding contemporary information systems (IS) phenomena. Value is co-created across organizational boundaries, enacted through digital technologies, and embedded in networks, platforms, and ecosystems. The Topical Collection on Digital Transformation & Service at Electronic Markets seeks to advance theoretically grounded and relevant IS research at the intersection of digital transformation and service.

We invite submissions that foreground service and digital transformation as they are established, debated, and further developed within the IS discipline, and in particular in Electronic Markets. Submitted articles should demonstrate a clear engagement with core IS literature to identify a well-defined research gap that matters for practice and theory, and articulate a convincing contribution to recent IS conversations. We are particularly interested in papers that move beyond broad claims about the consequences of digital transformation and instead examine how information technology (IT) artifacts ought to be designed and how they can be applied to foster value co-creation.

A central expectation of this Topical Collection is that submissions 'white-box' the role of IT artifacts. We seek papers that explicate how IT artifacts shape and are shaped by the digital transformation of organizations, for instance by enabling or transforming customer relations, value propositions, and service exchange. Studies may focus on (smart) service systems or ecosystems at varied levels, including communities, organizations, inter-organizational arrangements, platforms, data spaces, and society. In contrast, we do not seek papers that treat information systems as 'black boxes' or limit their analysis to summative business implications without theorizing the underlying structures, mechanisms, and affordances of IT artifacts through which these implications emerge. Manuscripts presenting IT artifacts that use or expand large language models or other large-scale artificial intelligence technologies must also be unpacked and contextualized, and presented in a way that is theoretically anchored and generates contributions at the intersection of digital transformation, service, and information systems.

We invite contributions from various epistemological positions and methodological traditions common in the IS discipline. Suitable submissions may include (action) design science, conceptual papers, qualitative studies, including case studies and Delphi studies, quantitative research, including experiments, surveys, and data-driven studies, and mixed-methods work. Literature reviews are also welcome, provided that they deliver strong theoretical implications and develop a forward-looking research agenda that reaches considerably beyond reporting the current state of research.

We particularly encourage submissions that investigate the role of digital technologies in real-world service scenarios. Studies that focus on inter-organizational contexts such as service networks, digital platforms, data spaces, or business ecosystems are especially relevant, as they touch on core topics of Electronic Markets. Submissions may examine established organizations, start-ups, public-sector organizations, communities, or other actor constellations in which digital technologies enable, constrain, or transform service exchange and value co-creation.

Potential topics

• Digital transformation and service in information systems
• Design and application of IT artifacts to foster value co-creation
• Smart service systems and ecosystems at multiple levels (communities, organizations, inter-organizational arrangements, platforms, data spaces, and society)
• Customer relations, value propositions, and service exchange enabled by digital technologies
• Role of digital technologies in real-world service scenarios
• Inter-organizational contexts such as service networks, digital platforms, data spaces, and business ecosystems
• Digital transformation in established organizations, start-ups, public-sector organizations, and communities
• IT artifacts using or expanding large language models and other large-scale artificial intelligence technologies
• Generative AI and digital responsibility in service contexts

Timeline

• Invalid DateTime: Submission deadline

Rainer Schmidt, Munich University of Applied Sciences

Rainer Alt, Leipzig University

Alfred Zimmermann, Reutlingen University

The Topical Collection on Artificial Intelligence-based Assistants and Platforms focuses on assistant systems (e.g. chatbots, recommenders) that are based on artificial intelligence and the interaction with users via declarative natural-language interfaces. They are present in various forms as well as industries and often assume a platform logic when services and devices from different providers are included.

The Topical Collection relates to a minitrack at the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) and comprises research on novel methods, models, processes, and approaches related to the design, implementation, deployment, operation, and optimization of AI-based assistants and platforms for the digital economy.

Potential topics

• Design, implementation, and deployment of AI-based assistants and platforms
• Novel methods and models for AI-based assistants (e.g., chatbots, recommenders)
• Natural language interfaces and user interaction with AI systems
• Platform logic and integration of services from different providers
• Operation and optimization of AI-based assistants and platforms for the digital economy
• AI-based assistants in various industries and applications

Timeline

• Invalid DateTime: Submission deadline