[Introduction]:

In the digital age, education has undergone a significant transformation. With the proliferation of technology in learning environments, the education sector has witnessed a dramatic increase in the generation of digital data. Consequently, over recent decades, learning analytics (LA) and educational data mining have evolved into significant areas of research, with the purpose of enhancing education at all educational levels (Deeva et al., 2021).  . . .

Work is becoming increasingly digitalized and change, underscores a critical dichotomy; the design of the digital infrastructure can either facilitate or impede the efficacy of workers in their everyday tasks. When the digital infrastructure poses obstacles, workarounds emerge and over time, become an integrated component in work routines.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on workarounds in different professional practices through our cross-case study we explore workarounds within the public sector. The contribution is three-fold: (i) we provide and argue for four general types of workarounds, which we derive from the empirical data from longitudinal data; (ii) we conceptualize workarounds as practices of innovation, evolution, and responsibility in contemporary work, and; (iii) we provide a framework for analyzing workarounds as technology-oriented versus task-oriented and individual versus collective dimensions.

The framework can be used by researchers and practitioners to identify tensions and to contribute to an increased understanding of the dilemmas, difficulties, and opportunities that an intensification of digitalization of work through digital infrastructures that call for extensive workarounds entails.

Purpose – This study aims to explore virtual leadership work within educational settings in the light of social disruption. In 2020, a global pandemic changed the way we work. For school leaders, that involved running a virtual school overnight. Although there is a stream of research that explores leadership in solely virtual communities, there is a gap in the literature regarding practices that transition from analog to virtual practices and the changes in leadership in those types of work practices.

Design/methodology/approach – The data gathering method constitutes a questionnaire to explore school leaders’ experiences of virtual work and virtual leadership in light of social disruption. One hundred and five Swedish school leaders answered the questionnaire covering both fixed and open questions.

Findings – The results show that school leaders’ general experiences of transition to virtual school have worked relatively well. We show how the work changes and shift the focus in the virtual workplace.

Originality/value – The author’s contributions include theorizing about leadership affordances in virtual schools and providing implications for practice. The authors summarize our main contribution in five affordances that characterize virtual leadership, including a focus on core activities, trust-based government, 1:1 communication with staff, structure and clarity and active outreach activities. The results could be interesting for understanding the radical digitalization of leadership in the digital workplace.

Social audit approaches to sustainable development in the textile industry predominate in worldwidepractice. However, research indicates that there are persistent structural non-compliance cases,demonstrating repetitive and harmful patterns and that creating codes of conduct as part of sustainability practices can only marginally improve worker rights on an overall level across industries. Due to these constraints associated with social audits, there's been a rising discourse about moving beyond these audits.In this paper we examine alternative approaches to social auditing to gain understanding, knowledge, collaboration, and empowerment within the value chain of brands, suppliers, and their employees. We target this emerging issue as a challenge for sustainable development of the textile industry. With a qualitative case study of a textile industry value chain as a base, and with the frames of the global sustainable development discourse, and ecosystem thinking, we suggest an alternative digital practice to social auditing in the textile industry, that gives workers a voice to speak with, that empowers the suppliers to take own control and responsibility over social conditions of their employees and that balances the present power takeover of brands. Merging the sustainable development discourse with digital ecosystems thinking when conceptualizing, theorizing or designing information systems (IS), we argue, is a way forward for IS to meet grand societal challenges. 

New self-care practices, such as self-management of chronic diseases, have emerged through mobile applications and devices, often designed, developed, and used outside the healthcare context. The development may lead to increased patient empowerment, shared decisionmaking and better communication, which is expected to benefit the care process. However, there are also potentially harmful effects related to safety, reliability, and security, with a corresponding need for understanding underlying algorithms and biases that may affect users. This calls for socio-technical perspectives, which take into consideration both the technological aspects of developing the app, as well as the social aspects of stakeholder involvement and collaborative design. In this paper, we describe the design and development of a mobile app for food nutrition information as part of diabetes self-management and critically discuss its implications for patients and designers. Our findings show that important learning aspects are connected to self-management, but there are also risks involved if too much or too little reliance is placed on the mobile app in the decision-making process. © 2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.

Teaching and learning design theory are challenging tasks. To solely teach design theory through rules or codes of conduct, could be seen as a static way of approaching a complex phenomenon. In this paper, we argue for the importance of engagement in sensitive design situations, an approach that entails a process of de-emphasizing objectivity and promoting subjectivity through real-life sensitive cases to learn from, to foster reflectiveness for the future designers. This study aims to explore how sensitive design situations can be used when teaching and learning design theory. The research approach consists of a case study in a Nordic university, and a course in interaction design in a software engineering program. The sensitive design situation involves designing a digital artifact that can help children that have been diagnosed with cancer, cope with their cancer treatment. The main contribution is a teaching method for cultivating ethical design, which includes the application of sensitive design situations when teaching ethics to students. We illustrate that by forwarding three characteristics that can be used when teaching and learning ethical design through sensitive design situations.

Being one of the worst industries in the world in terms of human and environmental abuse, the tex tile industry is in urgent need for sustainable transformation. Textile workers in the global south belong to a particularly precarious group of workers; they are mainly women, often young, migrant and in vulnerable job market positions. Social audit is a practice that brands engage in to measure, understand and report on social and ethical performance in their supply chain. However, research shows that social audits marginally improve worker rights and a lot of structural non-compliance is recidivist: that is, it is repetitive and pernicious. Therefore, the discussion of going beyond auditing towards distributed communicative governance among participant organizations in the supply chain is becoming both attractive and urgent. In this paper we present a research proposal that explores alternative practices to social auditing . . .

We make an abundance of choices daily and an increasing proportion of those choices are in an online context. Digital nudges refer to the use of design elements that guide the decision-making process towards a predefined goal. An important consideration when designing digital nudges is the ethical implications. In this study, we examine how future designers perceive ethics and the use of digital nudges as design elements in interaction design. We conducted a case study with 72 design students at two Nordic universities with a focus on the future designers’ perception of ethics and the use of digital nudges as design elements. We show that ethics and reflection on responsibility are highly important aspects of choice architecture design and future designers understand ethics as crucial for design work, yet few reflect on whether a specific design or a nudge is ethical or not. Moreover, when it comes to nudging as a design element, both positive and ambivalent attitudes are common. Our main contribution consists of an in-depth understanding of future designers’ perspectives on nudging, and we forward four fundamental questions which have implications for teaching the ethics of choice architecture to future designers.