Toward JUSTIS - A research program aimed at fostering business ethics by empowering stakeholders through information systems

As incidents involving corporate social responsibility-or rather the lack thereof-hit headlines at regular intervals, stakeholders are becoming increasingly concerned about ethical issues, thus encouraging researchers to identify problematic business processes and pressing practitioners to start rectifying their questionable courses of action. In the meantime, information systems (IS) are becoming ever more pervasive and ubiquitous and are shaping and altering many of our everyday activities and behavior. We argue that when it comes to promoting ethical behaviors, IS can be used as powerful tools to empower stakeholders, and, thus, it is crucial to consider the role that IS can play in either advancing or deterring ethical-or conversely, unethical-behaviors. In this article, we present a research agenda for a new research program specifically concerned with the task of analyzing the social impact of existing IS and devising new ones that can be used to encourage ethical behavior. Just IS is the name of this program. © 2013 by the Association for Information Systems.