Synthesis of a Governance Framework for Blockchain Technology: A Meta-synthesis

The governance of blockchain (BC) technology is a topic of continuing study, and a multidisciplinary perspective on blockchain governance is essential for building a formal governance framework for this emerging technology. While there may be some misconceptions surrounding the topic of blockchain governance, it is worth noting that blockchain technology itself has garnered increasing attention from both academic and business communities worldwide. Blockchain stakeholders cannot work or make rational decisions optimally without enough insight into the governance of blockchains. The element that organisations and end-users must consider in their decisions, is the element of regulation for the blockchain technology or network, which regulators and developers still need to grasp this concept. There is a pressing need for meta-synthesis concerning blockchain governance to address the limitations of individual studies, generate new insights and understandings, identify gaps in the existing research, and keep up with the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field. This Meta-synthesis study intends to provide a systematic literature review to evaluate the current Information Systems (IS) literature in search of evidence of governance concerns and frameworks within the blockchain technology environment. In this research, literature shall be used to inform the development and proposition of the synthesized integrated blockchain governance framework model so that there is a common frame of reference for researchers and assists practitioners and business managers of companies in conducting more organised analyses of blockchain governance. As the issue was completely addressed throughout the five-stage assessment, the remaining 30 publications were coded using Nvivo software, 42 codes were created. Each author contributed to summarising and categorising the resultant codes (axial coding). The innovative blockchain governance framework proposes four perspectives: Open-Source System (OSS) Governance Phases, Open-Source System (OSS) Life Cycle Stages, blockchain governance framework dimensions and layers and the Technology-Organisation-Environment (TOE) framework model. It is one of the first research papers in the information systems field to make use of a meta-synthesis approach to consolidate the existing qualitative research and to systematically come up with a blockchain governance framework.