Critically studying openness: A way forward

Abstract

The goal of this special issue on “Critical perspectives on information systems and openness: Emerging discourses, meanings, models, and implications” is to advance a critical debate in Information Systems research on the theme of openness. Research in information systems on openness has focused on the nature of technology and how openness contributes to the development of new opportunities for technological and institutional enhancements even as it introduces various limitations. However, more often than not, we take for granted the positive potential of openness guided by a market‐driven focus, which tends to marginalize potential distortions understood through interpretive, critical, and contextualized social theoretical positions. The aim of this special issue is to move beyond positivist and functionalist approaches, which merely promote rhetoric and hype, and critically and interpretively explore and explain the nature of openness and its enabling and constraining role in our pursuit for technological and institutional innovations. The aim of this special issue is thus to offer a venue for the critical study of the phenomenon of openness and its impact on people, organizations, and societies. The promises of openness are many, including its economic potential to generate innovations contributing to new industries, enhance transparency, accountability, and democratic processes of citizen participation in governance. Another oft discussed promise of openness concerns raising the accountability and transparency of State processes leading to more evolved democracy. Openness is not a monolithic concept, but is associated with various paradigms and practices which keeps our understanding of the phenomenon in flux, constantly being negotiated and contested, and influencing meanings of core associated concepts of communities and participation. Openness can potentially give rise to many paradoxes. For example, generating innovations may require openness for collaboration among industrial actors, while the commercialization of the innovation may raise the contrary need to enhance protection by limiting openness. Open international production may weaken local economies and domestic jobs, but at the same time potentially improve the export performance of a country. While open education may significantly empower students at the fringes of society, it may also reconfigure educational institutions to adopt market‐driven strategies that arguably could undermine traditional educational values. Furthermore, while open government data is critical for transparency and accountability, it may strike back on a failing regime. Openness has various dimensions, such as relating to global public goods, software, data, standards, infrastructure, governance processes, content, access, and various others. These dimensions will have different implications in varying domains, for example, transparency may be of primary interest in discussing government processes, while open public facing data ismost important in discussing response to public health epidemics. These different dimensions of openness may interact and create effects that can both create synergy in certain settings, yet also may undermine each other in other settings. For example, in the quest for enhancing open data, we may lose attention to the software aspect, and could justify the use of proprietary rather than open software. The increasing attention on open publishing has given rise to large numbers of open journals, with both positive and negative implications for academia and research. Our summary of the concept of openness emphasizes a number of issues. Firstly, it means different things to different stakeholder groups, and these meanings are situated, contested, negotiated, and evolving. Secondly,