CFP Blockchain

Journal
of the Association for Information Systems

Call for Papers for Special Issue

Opportunities and Challenges of Blockchain Technology

Deadline for submissions: 01 March 2018

Guest editors

Matti Rossi, Aalto University
Roman Beck, IT University of Copenhagen
Jason Bennett Thatcher, Clemson University

Background

Blockchain represents a new class of distributed, transactional database technologies with
potential to change the foundations of information based markets and organizations.

Blockchain is a reliable, secure, distributed, transactional database technology well-suited
for supporting exchanges in decentralized environments. Blockchain enables smart
contracts, which encode the rules for completing transactions in software and autonomously
enforce these rules by making contract breaches prohibitively expensive. Smart contracts
can be embedded in digital goods or digital representations of physical goods, automatically
and autonomously triggering actions such as payments if certain conditions are met or if
certain events occur.

These properties, of automaticity, autonomy, and enforcement, enable applications of
blockchain that create “smart property” in which case the database inventories and tracks
hard assets such as diamonds or cars, and also enables buy-sell mechanisms for these assets.
These properties can enable transactional mechanisms central to the “sharing economy” as
automatically recording and enabling transactions mitigates the risks and uncertainties
inherent to large-scale peer-to-peer transactions. Similarly, these properties could enable
coordination of transactions and information exchanges within the emerging “Internet of
things”, where an increasing number of physical devices connect and coordinate activities
via the Internet.

Due to the blockchain’s ability to enforce contracts, advocates argue its application is
relevant to any problem domain where actors must reliably record decentralized
transactions, in particular in environments where not all parties, whether humans or
machines, can be fully trusted. For example, financial instruments like payments and trading
records can be supported by blockchain technology, which can be designed to prevent
double spending, forgeries, or disputes. Beyond financial markets, blockchain is well-suited
for recording public information such as titles, birth certificates, votes, or court records. By
profoundly altering the back-end of how Information Systems (IS) support and store
transactions, blockchain technologies may also alter the organizing logic of firms and society.

Due to blockchain’s potential to alter sociotechnical systems, there is an urgent need for
systematic inquiry to study blockchain from an Information Systems perspective. Hence, for
the Special Issue on Opportunities and Challenges of Blockchain Technology, we seek
studies employing all IS research traditions, such as design science, behavioural, or
economics as well as qualitative, quantitative, or mixed methods. Studies should be theory-
driven or theory-building, offering novel insights with clear implications for research and
practice on blockchain’s potential to transform the lives of individuals and the relationships
among individuals, organizations, and society.

Relevant topics for this Special Issue include (but are not limited to):

• Blockchain and its impact on organizational strategy
• Blockchain and its impact on the digitization of firm processes
• Blockchain as an infrastructure to facilitate the interplay between sectors, to enable
global commerce and revenue collection
• Institutional and social implications of blockchain
• Actors in blockchain value chains and value networks
• Standards and interfaces related to blockchain
• Blockchain developers and communities
• Business model destruction/creation caused by blockchain
• Business value of blockchain
• Blockchain and how it is different from other technologies
• Blockchain as a trust enabling or trust-free technology
• Acceptance of blockchain among individual users
• Privacy and security issues related to blockchain
• Assimilation of blockchain into internal firm processes or across markets

Editorial Board

Pär Ågerfalk, Uppsala University
Christian Becker, University of Mannheim
Joseph Bonneau, Stanford University
Joseph Feller, University College Cork
Ola Henfridsson, Warwick Business School
John Leslie King, University of Michigan
Mary Lacity, University of Missouri-St. Louis
Xin Li, City University of Hong Kong
Juho Lindman, University of Gothenburg | Chalmers UT
Gerhard Schwabe, University of Zurich
Carsten Sørensen, London School of Economics
Mari-Klara Stein, Copenhagen Business School
Chee-Wee Tan, Copenhagen Business School
Robin Teigland, Stockholm School of Economics
Virpi Tuunainen, Aalto University

Important dates (the review deadlines are preliminary targets):

01 Mar 2018 Deadline for submission of papers to the Special Issue
20 Mar 2018 Authors advised regarding paper acceptance for review
10 May 2018 First round of reviews completed and authors advised regarding review
outcomes
10 Aug 2018 Deadline for revised papers
01 Oct 2018 Second round of reviews completed and authors advised regarding
review outcomes
15 Nov 2018 Deadline for revised papers
01 Dec 2018 Final editorial decision on papers acceptance for the Special Issue
15 Dec 2018 Special Issue papers submitted to JAIS for publications

All papers will be peer reviewed and must follow the standard guidelines for manuscript
preparation and submission posted on the JAIS website (http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/).

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