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This paper is an extension of a panel presentation delivered in response to a joint call for panels by the Social Informatics and Information Ethics and Policy Special Interest Groups for the 2022 Association for Information Science and Technology conference. The purpose is to introduce critical race frameworks and tenets as a lens to develop, assess and analyze the social informatics (SI) within information science (IS) research, professional discourse, praxis and pedagogical paradigms. This paper spotlights one of the presentations from that panel, an iteration of Critical Race Theory (CRT) designed specifically for information studies: CRiTical Race information Theory (CRiT).

Just as importantly, using SI as part of the context, the paper also includes a discussion that illustrates research and theory building possibilities as both counter and complement to the technocratic advances that permeate society at every level (macro, mezzo and micro), which can also be reasonably framed as the information industrial complex. Thus, CRiT joins other forms of critical discourse and praxis grappling with deconstructing, decolonizing, demarginalizing and demystifying the influence and impact of information technologies. While CRiT has global intentions and implications, this specific discussion has an extensive American focus.

If we consider the rapid pace in which techno-determinism is moving toward the vise grip of techno-fatalism controlled by frameworks generated from the information industrial complex, we can reasonably consider that humanity on a global basis is living within a meta-large technocratic crisis moment. This crisis moment is both acute and chronic. That is, the technocratic crisis is continuously moving quickly while simultaneously worsening over an extended period of time with no remedies and few responses to substantively address the crisis.

Part of the nature of information and data is measurability. Thus, identifying compatible nomenclature connecting the descriptiveness of intersectionality (a seminal CRT tool) as a qualitative research method to the measurability of data connected to quantitative research, a mixed method approach moves from possible to plausible. Additionally, within IS, there are often opportunities to measure human engagement, such as social media content, search engine use, assessing practices of categorizations, and multiple forms of surveillance data as a short list. Hence, the descriptiveness of intersectional qualitative research “mixed” with the measurability of quantitative research within information settings implies exponential methodological possibilities.

CRiT is multilayered, on the one hand, with the intention of being a discipline-specific, information-specific form of CRT. On the other hand, CRiT theory building is interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary based on information as omnipresent phenomena. An ongoing challenge for CRiT theory building is identifying and working within a balance between, practitioners who typically throw anything and everything at practical problems, while scholars often slice problems into such small segments that practical understanding is severely limited. Embracing and integrating the dynamic interplay between developing ideas and using them is the key to evolving CRiT within the social sciences.

There is plenty of room as well as a need for additional narrative discussing or challenging the use or appropriation of information from a technocratic approach, a counter to the information industrial complex.

CRiT is emerging and cutting edge in discussion that addresses the technocratic determinism found in most scholarly discourses.

The purpose of this study is to examine the potential of integrating material from the arts into postgraduate curricula to deepen students’ engagement with marketing phenomena. The authors assess the use of arts-based activities, within a broader critical pedagogy, for encouraging imaginative and analytical thinking.

The authors devised two learning activities and an interpretive method for studying their value. The activities were an individual essay connecting themes in song lyrics to marketing, and a group photography project. These were applied, within a broader, critical approach, in postgraduate modules on sustainability, ethics and critical marketing. Data collection comprised diaries kept by the teachers, open-ended feedback from students and students’ assignments.

Students showed high levels of engagement, reflexivity and depth of thought, in felt experiences of learning. Their ability to make connections not explicitly in the materials, and requiring imaginative jumps, was notable. Several reported lasting changes to their behaviour. Some found the tasks initially intimidating or, once they were more engaged, stressful or saddening.

This adds to scholarship on management education by showing the usefulness of an arts-based approach towards a transformative agenda.

It offers a template of how to draw from the arts to strengthen critical engagement upon which marketing teachers can build. It also contains practical advice on the challenges and benefits of doing so.

The authors provide evidence that this approach can enhance sensitivity and reflexivity in students, potentially producing more ethical and sustainable decisions in future.

The pedagogical interventions are novel and of value to lecturers seeking to enhance critical engagement with theory. An empirical study of an attempt to integrate arts into teaching marketing represents a promising direction, given the discipline’s creative nature.

Mapping and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) are widely used in disaster research and practice. While, in some cases, these practices incorporate methods inspired by critical cartography and critical GIS, they rarely engage with the theoretical discussions that animate those fields.

In this commentary, the author considers three such discussions, and draws out their relevance for disaster studies: the turn towards processual cartographies, political economy analysis of datafication and calls for theorising computing of and from the South.

The review highlights how these discussions can contribute to the work of scholars engaged in mapping for disaster risk management and research. First, it can counter the taken-for-granted nature of disaster-related maps, and encourage debate about how such maps are produced, used and circulated. Second, it can foster a reflexive attitude towards the urge to quantify and map disasters. Third, it can help to rethink the role of digital technologies with respect to ongoing conversations on the need to decolonise disaster studies.

The paper aims to familiarise disaster studies scholars with literature that has received relatively little attention in this field and, by doing so, contribute to a repoliticisation of disaster-related maps.

In this article, we highlight ways in which disability critical race theory (DisCrit) (Annamma et al., 2013), inclusive education and community-based participatory research (CBPR) can be used within professional development schools (PDS) to provide students with disabilities with more access to inclusive classrooms. At a grade 4–6 elementary school, we developed a model of a critical PDS to promote inclusive education and facilitate the transition of students of color with disabilities from self-contained to inclusive classrooms. We conducted semi-structured interviews and used action plan meetings with school administrators, teachers, professionals and students with disabilities and their parents to assess the impact of our critical PDS model. Findings suggest this model had a positive impact on administrators’ and teachers’ critical consciousness, ideological and instructional practices, students of color with disabilities’ social, academic and personal outcomes, as well as a schoolwide culture of inclusion and social justice. This study can inform tailored professional development efforts to improve educators’ inclusive practices.

We conducted semi-structured interviews and used action plan meetings with school administrators, teachers, professionals and students with disabilities and their parents to assess the impact of our critical PDS model.

The findings of this study suggest this model had a positive impact on administrators’ and teachers’ critical consciousness, ideological and instructional practices, students of color with disabilities’ social, academic and personal outcomes, as well as a schoolwide culture of inclusion and social justice.

This study can inform tailored professional development efforts aiming to improve educators’ inclusive practices.

We developed a model of a critical PDS to promote inclusive education and facilitate the transition of students of color with disabilities from self-contained to inclusive classrooms.

The paper explores the potential value of urban assemblage theory as a conceptual framework for understanding the role heritage has in social sustainable urban placemaking. The authors conceptualise urban placemaking as a dynamic and complex social assemblage. Heritage is one of the many dimensions of such a complex and dynamic urban assembly. Based on the approach to urban assemblage theory, the authors aim to uncover how postindustrial city-making unfolds. When approaching the case studies, the authors ask the following: Whose city for which citizens are visible through the selected case studies? How is social sustainability achieved through heritage in urban placemaking?

The main research material is derived from theoretical literature and the testing of an assemblage methodological approach through three Norwegian urban regeneration case studies where heritage partake in urban placemaking. The three case studies are the Tukthus wall (what is left of an 19th century old prison), the Vulkan neighbourhood (an 19th century industrial working area) and Sørengkaia (an 19th century industrial harbour area) in Oslo, Norway. The three case studies are representing urban regeneration projects which are common worldwide, and not at least in a European context.

The paper reveals the dynamic factors and processes at play in urban placemaking, which has its own distinct character by the uses of heritage in each of the case study areas. Placemaking could produce “closed” systems which are stable in accordance with its original functions, or they could be “open” systems affected by the various drivers of change. The paper shows how these forces are depending on two sets of binary forces at play in urban placemaking: forces of “assemblages” co-creating a place versus destabilising forces of “disassembly” which is redefining the place as a process affected by reassembled placemaking.

For research, the authors focus on the implications this paper has for the field of urban heritage studies as it provides a useful framework to capture the dynamic complexity of urban heritage areas.

For practice, the authors state that the paper can provide a useful platform for dialogue and critical thinking on strategies being planned.

For society, the paper promotes the significance in terms of fostering an inclusive way of thinking and planning for urban heritage futures.

The paper outlines dynamics of urban regeneration through heritage which are significant for understanding urban transformation as value for offering practical solutions to social problems in urban planning. The assemblage methodological approach (1) makes awareness of the dynamic processes at play in urban placemaking and makes the ground for mapping issue at stake in urban placemaking; (2) becomes a source for modelling urban regeneration through heritage by defining a conceptual framework of dynamic interactions in urban placemaking; and (3) defines a critically reflexive tool for evaluating good versus bad (heritage-led) urban development projects.

The purpose of this article is to address research gaps relating to agency and institutionalism in new institutional theory (NIT) and institutional work (IW) and use the critical sensemaking (CSM) approach to bridge the debates around agency, especially on issues of language and discourse, actor network theory (ANT) and history.

A conceptual analysis of the literature is performed to discuss issues of agency in IW and CSM in organizations, and examples of empirical studies are used to illustrate connectivity, contrast and fusion.

The analysis illustrates points of distance (rather than disconnect), but most importantly, connectivity and the potential for further developments between the literature on IW and CSM.

Discussion around new possibilities to focus on agency has the potential to contribute to humanist thinking about the (agentic) character of organizations and the potential for social change.

The article contributes to the discussion of agency in the organization through a starting point (i.e. CSM) outside of NIT.

The scarcity of women in advertising creative departments has been reported globally, particularly in creative managerial roles. This study goes a step beyond this evidence since this paper aims to test whether having at least one token woman in creative managerial positions (token+) may be associated with a larger presence of females in low-level creative jobs compared to creative departments led only by male creative managers.

A content analysis of the credit forms of 839 Spanish campaigns released in 2019 was conducted to determine the gender composition of 116 creative departments with more than three professionals.

Generalized Poisson Regressions indicated that when at least a token woman is present in a creative management role within agency networks, the number of females in low-level positions doubles with respect to creative departments led only by male managers. This relation was not found for independent agencies, though. The results are discussed under the lens of critical mass theory, attraction paradigm and homophily theory.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, it is the first time in the literature that the relation among the number of token+ advertising female creative managers and the amount of females in lower-level creative positions is tested. This research is also original because the sample is from a non-Anglo-Saxon country. Moreover, the use of the Generalized Poisson Regressions technique is another novelty of this paper.

This study aims to holistically explore the academic literature on female leaders to identify the key topics and dynamics of the field.

The authors systematically review 532 papers to explore the research on female leaders; based on objective and replicable criteria, the authors identify relevant papers and thus ensure the quality of the analysis. The bibliometric analysis and visualization support us in recognizing trends in this topic.

This study outlines the state of the art over the past decade by synthesizing theoretical contexts and critically discussing the main streams of research on sustainability, firm outcomes and barriers preventing women from reaching the upper echelons. The authors also explore empirical issues and highlight areas that entail new paths for future scholars.

The research provides novel evidence of the attempt internationally to increase female participation at the top of the firm hierarchy by analyzing firm outcomes, sustainability and the constraints faced by women in achieving these careers.

The results show that the participation of women in leadership roles is not (only) a matter of compliance with current regulations. Through their ability to monitor key social and environmental issues from a long-term perspective and their attention to the internal control systems, companies more effectively pursue their financial and nonfinancial aims.

Using bibliographic and narrative analyses, this study reviews the literature on women at the top of the firm hierarchy with a focus on business research. The authors extend prior studies by investigating a larger pool of firm roles to provide a comprehensive understanding of this widely discussed topic.

This paper undertakes a structured literature review to analyse the literature on performance management and measurement (PMM) in universities over the last four decades. Over that time, PMM has emerged as an influential force in universities that impacts their operations and redefines their identity.

A structured literature review approach was used to analyse a sample of articles on PMM research from a broad range of disciplines over four decades. This was undertaken to understand the impacts of PMM practices on universities, highlight changes over time and point to avenues for future research.

The analysis highlights the fact that research on PMM in universities has grown significantly over the 40 years studied. We provide an overview of published articles over four decades regarding content, themes, theories, methods and impacts. We provide an empirical basis for discussing past, present and future university PMM research. The future research avenues offer multiple provocations for scholars and policymakers, for instance, PMM implementation strategies and relationships with various government programs and external evaluation and the role of different actors, particularly academics, in shaping PMM systems.

Unlike a traditional literature review, the structured literature review method can develop insights into how the field has changed over time and highlight possible future research. The sample for this literature review differs from previous reviews in covering a broad range of disciplines, including accounting.

To cope with the COVID-19 pandemic, contact tracing mobile apps (CTMAs) have been developed to trace contact among infected individuals and alert people at risk of infection. To disrupt virus transmission until the majority of the population has been vaccinated, achieving the herd immunity threshold, CTMA continuance usage is essential in managing the COVID-19 pandemic. This study seeks to examine what motivates individuals to continue using CTMAs.

Following the coping theory, this study proposes a research model to examine CTMA continuance usage, conceptualizing opportunity appraisals (perceived usefulness and perceived distress relief), threat appraisals (privacy concerns) and secondary appraisals (perceived response efficacy) as the predictors of individuals' CTMA continuance usage during the pandemic. In the United States, an online survey was administered to 551 respondents.

The results revealed that perceived usefulness and response efficacy motivate CTMA continuance usage, while privacy concerns do not.

This study enriches the understanding of CTMA continuance usage during a public health crisis, and it offers practical recommendations for authorities.