Information Systems Management

Responsible Design: Care Ethics for AI-Enabled Systems

Artificial intelligence and digital systems increasingly mediate organizational, civic, and public life. While contemporary debates on responsible AI have generated extensive discussion concerning fairness, transparency, accountability, and governance, much of this discourse remains procedural in orientation, emphasizing compliance frameworks, technical safeguards, and risk mitigation mechanisms. Less attention has been paid to the structural, relational, and institutional conditions through which digital systems shape vulnerability, participation, legitimacy, and human agency.

This Special Issue seeks to advance a broader and more structurally aware conversation concerning the ethical design and governance of AI-enabled systems. In particular, it explores the potential contribution of care ethics and relational approaches to Information Systems research and practice. Care ethics foregrounds interdependence, responsiveness, vulnerability, attentiveness, repair, and situated responsibility, offering an important lens through which to reconsider how digital systems are designed, implemented, governed, and evaluated.

The Special Issue invites contributions that move beyond abstract or purely procedural approaches to AI ethics by examining how responsibility is distributed across socio-technical arrangements and institutional structures. We particularly welcome work that addresses the relationship between technology, power, participation, exclusion, legitimacy, and accountability within contemporary digital environments.

Topics of Interest

Relevant topics include, but are not limited to:

• Care ethics and Information Systems design
• Responsible AI and relational accountability
• Ethics of participation, inclusion, and exclusion in digital systems
• Structural ethics and socio-technical governance
• Human-centred and care-centred AI design
• Vulnerability, dependency, and digital infrastructures
• AI governance and institutional legitimacy
• Ethics of repair, maintenance, and redress in digital systems
• Participatory and inclusive approaches to AI governance
• Responsible innovation and structurally aware design
• Public sector AI and questions of care, trust, and legitimacy
• Algorithmic systems and the distribution of risk and burden
• Gender, inequality, and digital governance
• Ethics of automated decision-making
• Relational approaches to trust, transparency, and accountability
• Organizational responsibility in AI-enabled environments
• Care ethics and sustainability in digital transformation

Types of Contributions

The Special Issue welcomes:

• Empirical research papers
• Conceptual and theoretical contributions
• Design science research
• Critical and interdisciplinary perspectives
• Practice-oriented and policy-focused studies
• Case studies and comparative analyses

Submissions from diverse epistemological, methodological, and disciplinary traditions are encouraged where they contribute to advancing understanding of responsible and structurally aware approaches to AI-enabled systems.