The leading journals of a scholarly field define the intellectual content of the field. They determine to a large degree the identity and the specificity of the field they lead. In carrying out this responsibility, these journals cannot limit themselves to a relatively passive filtering of submissions with a stringent peer-review process. They should foster the future of the discipline they represent by attracting papers that are salient to the present and those that point to the future, with their methodological rigor buttressing their claims to a significant novel contribution. In a sociotechnical field such as Information Systems, the context of our research is shaped by the technological innovations realized by the flagship high-tech firms, the start-ups, and the ecosystem in between. We have to work analytically within this context, but not limit ourselves to it. We should provide intellectual leadership to exert our influence where our deep understanding of human-technology interaction can contribute to improving the present and aim at the future where the technological innovation can benefit all. A principal means at the disposal of the editors-in-chief of the top-tier journals in carrying out their responsibility of shaping their field are special issues and special sections, guest-edited by the thought leaders of the research area.
This issue of the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS) brings you a Special Issue on Fostering the Design and Governance of the Metaverse, which exemplifies this fostering. The Guest Editors, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Waifong Boh, Stacie Petter, and Jan Marco Leimeister, indeed describe this aim in their introductory paper. The Metaverse as a global grand projet that can (perhaps) be realized by the largest of high-tech firms has been crowded out at present by the intellectual and financial attention devoted to artificial intelligence (AI). This might be for the better, as we hardly wish it to bloom in a few walled corporate gardens, with limited interoperability. It would be inimical to the very essence of the Metaverse. The papers of the Special Issue showcase how the elements of the Metaverse emerge in a bottom-up fashion from the diverse research and projects. An express aim of including this Special Issue in JMIS is to stimulate further research in this vast domain, and to help progressively actualize the broad vision with a more specific and disciplined organizing vision that could be realized by multiple distributed centers of initiative.
The definitions of the Metaverse abound and differ, however they do converge in their essence. The Metaverse is an immersive and persistent virtual space (or multiplicity of overlapping virtual spaces) realized with information technology (IT) and shared among users represented by their avatars. In a sense, people would live and work in this space complimenting their physical environments, as their personal and collective activities are actualized with the evolving individual technological support. The emergence of the Metaverse driven by a wide innovation frontier, notably including new business models enabled by collaboration and value co-creation, online tokenization, digital twinning, massively multi-player online role-player games, and the ever more acceptable wearable IT. The papers the Guest Editors include in the issue study metaverses in the small, investigating their design, effectiveness, and impacts. The papers show the users’ appropriation of the concept, the business models and the differing designs in what we can expect to become a part of the Metaverse as an emergent way of life enabled by IT. We can perceive how the lifestyle and business opportunities can lead to an enhanced and inclusive well-being of all. With the positive comes the negative, as the duality of IT impacts asserts itself in a Janusian manner. Our research should include the advance counteractions to the potential dark sides of the Metaverse, notably the fractured sense of personal identity, impaired privacy, abuse by surveillance, bad actors’ gaining various degrees of control, and exclusion as opposed to the desired broad inclusivity. Thus far, the work in the Metaverse has been a particularly challenging enterprise, with notable successes in several domains, such as healthcare, entertainment, and bio-pharma developments. Some countries, such as South Korea, have national programs aiming at the development of the Metaverse as a backbone of their socio-economic progress. We need to understand the culturally situated impacts on the individuals’ habitus in participating in the Metaverse and indeed their motivations to do so. With the highly ambitious vision of the expanding Metaverse, its potential impacts on private and public communities, business firms, and polities will be a highly fruitful research area. In their introductory paper of the Special Issue, the Guest Editors provide you with the analysis of the current status and the roadmap to the future of this exciting vision.
The first paper of the general section analyzes empirically the effects of IT on the treatment of chronic patients. More specifically, Xiangru Chen, Xiao Ma, Kevin P. Scheibe, and Norman Johnson investigate the effects of the integration of telemedicine into the (obviously protracted) course of treatment of such patients. In a carefully crafted study with an econometric analysis of the patient data, the authors surface the benefits of omnichannel integration for new patients, with a rather muted effect in the cases of the existing ones. With the increase in the adoption of the expanding facilities for telemedicine and the partly mimetic adoption patterns, we can perceive the echoes of the Special Issue in the progressive expansion of the multichannel treatment options in healthcare.
Business networks have largely replaced value chains in the organization of commerce. Decision-making in this environment is more difficult owing to the greater quantity, variety, and complexity of information, and increasingly relies on the new AI algorithms serving the purpose. Here, Jianfei Wang, Lina Zhou, Cuiqing Jiang, and Zhao Wang present a method and an algorithm addressing the propagation of financial effects to the neighbors in such dynamic business networks. The authors demonstrate the superiority of their TAGOL algorithm with respect to the existing methods in the contexts of the prediction of credit risk and financial distress. The construction of such predictive models can have salutary effects on the performance of the owner firms and, moreover, on the recognition of the economic value of AI to the organizations.