[Rdf-internal] FW: The Journal of Information Technology - Decision on Manuscript ID JIN-25-1031

[Bernd Stahl (staff)]

Hi all,
Here is the feedback from the editors of the SI on "Futuring: a Novel Site of Inquiry and Imagination”. As you can see, they are inviting us to develop the paper and submit it in February but make sure that it covers future developments. I would suggest we discuss this during our away afternoon on the 7th of November.

Kind regards,
Bernd

-----Original Message-----
From: Journal of Information Technology <onbehalfof at manuscriptcentral.com> 
Sent: 13 October 2025 09:38
To: Bernd Stahl (staff) <Bernd.Stahl at nottingham.ac.uk>
Cc: schlagwein at sydney.edu.au
Subject: The Journal of Information Technology - Decision on Manuscript ID JIN-25-1031

13-Oct-2025

Dear Bernd and author team,:

Thank you for your extended abstract submission (JIN-25-1031 entitled "Models of Responsibility for Digital Futures – A Comparative Case Study"") for the JIT special issue on “Futuring: a Novel Site of Inquiry and Imagination”.  The number of submissions we received is reflective of the growing interest in engaging seriously with futures and in new ways of thinking about and with futures.

The Editors of the Special Issue each selected abstracts and provided brief initial editorial comments (included below). Given the capabilities if the system, all abstracts were designated as “Major Revisions” (there is no subtle meaning here). The purpose of these comments is to provide an ‘editorial sense’ of the fit of your research with what we hope to achieve in the Special Issue. These comments are not in any way final decisions but should be considered as useful advice as you refine your ideas and complete your paper for submission on Feb 15, 2026. There is no need to provide a response document to these comments. At that time, we will send suitable submissions out for review. 

The SI is seeking methodological and conceptual views of future(s) that inspire new thinking for IS and management scholars.  Specifically, we hope to see a focus beyond technology itself and instead with the manner in which technologies, taken broadly, are involved in social, economic, environmental and/or political conditions for those humans and more-than human who inhabit the planet. We are also open to submissions articulating established future-studies methods provided they illustrate how scholars can better consider what has not yet happened when studying the normalization of what we currently categorize as emerging digital technologies Although there is a broad literature distributed across many discipline, we are not expecting comprehensive reviews of all literature and would prefer to see the author(s) ideas in relation to a narrower set of truly relevant prior research. [NOTE: de Vaujany et al. (2025 - MISQ) Rethinking Responsibility in the Digital Age: A Narrative Approach]

We are currently planning a workshop at ICIS 2026 for the SI. This will be held in hybrid mode and is optional. Once we have the details are worked out, we will send these directly to you. 

Thank you again for submitting your abstract. We hope the comments provide some guidance beyond the CfP (https://callsforpapers.org/call/jit-futuring-digital-futures-as-a-novel-site-of-inquiry-and-imagination) that will help you add to the IS discipline’s ability to engage with and conceptualize future(s).

Best Regards,

Dirk
Benjamin
Liz
Mike 


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Once again, thank you for submitting your manuscript to the Journal of Information Technology and I look forward to receiving your revision.

Sincerely,

Professor Dirk Hovorka
The Journal of Information Technology
dirk.hovorka at sydney.edu.au



Reviewer(s)' Comments to Author:

Reviewer: 1

Comments to the Author

Thank you very much for submitting your work on “Models of Responsibility for Digital Futures – A Comparative Case Study” to JIT’s special issue on Futuring: ‘Digital’ Futures as a Novel Site of Inquiry and Imagination. As guest editors, we have carefully reviewed all the extended abstracts submitted for early screening carefully and were delighted to read about the many future-oriented works in information systems research and beyond.

We have read your proposal with great interest and are in agreement that engaging with different models of digital responsibility can be considered as quite crucial for our engagement with digital futures. We also share a great appreciation for ethical and social considerations that our overall digitalization efforts are based on and believe that work such as your can be of great value in informing our stakeholders.

Working through your proposal, however, leads us to observe that futures per se remain relatively implicit. While they can be seen as the object that actors you study ought to take responsibility for, your study itself does not engage in any futuring or with any of the futures. Consequently, the present version of the proposed contribution leaves us a bit uncertain in terms of fit.

Our thoughts when engaging with your writing lead us to suggest one possible way forward though. We assume that your study of the research projects at the heart of your comparative cases will, to some degree, engage with futures. Could their futuring and the futures they envision be made a core part of your thinking and writing? While it is difficult to anticipate based on your proposal at this stage, we imagine that your engagement with the research projects as part of your case studies would allow you to study how futures are being constructed in the team, how these are used to develop an understanding of responsibility (which may correspond with one of your models), and how that responsibility is subsequently dealt with and what the implications of this is. 

In the absence of such a focusing, we fear that the core of the study may turn out to be a rather orthodox empirical study of a present phenomenon (different models of responsibility employed by the research teams) in the here and now, even if the content of the models is per se oriented toward the future.

Hoping that these comments can provide a bit of clarification on what the CfP is looking for and how your work can be seen to resonate with this, we’d be happy to explore this issue further with you at the workshop. We will, however, keep a critical eye on fit the special issue’s core purpose.