Taking the measure of digital giants: Amazon and the Social Welfare Computing research agenda

How can and should the IS field best contribute to the Social Welfare Computing research agenda, which seeks to assess unintended consequences and propose better solutions related to the potential harms of digital business practices? In this discussion paper, we take Amazon.com, Inc. as an instance of a giant digital company and examine it structurally as a sociotechnical actor engaging in a broad range of digital features and business practices. The picture that emerges from this analysis (a company engaging in systematically unfair competitive behavior) is quite different from one derived from the IS literature about Amazon as a company (a technologically savvy and strategically successful player). This analysis is provisional and deserves to be reproduced, possibly by reassembling the IS literature on such topics as electronic marketplaces, recommender systems, and online reviews, into a specific profile for each of the digital giants. Regardless, the analysis is this paper suggests the possibility of blindspots in traditional IS research on digital business activities, and it offers some suggestions for future research on the Social Welfare Computing research agenda. In particular, IS scholarship should emphasize corporate actors in addition to isolated technology features and business practices.

Automated summary

This paper discusses how the IS field can best contribute to the Social Welfare Computing research agenda and uses Amazon.com as a case study. The analysis suggests that traditional IS research may have blind spots in assessing the potential harms of digital business activities. Therefore, future research should focus on studying corporate behaviors.