Electronic identification; digital identity; self-sovereign identity; interpretive flexibility; social construction of technology
Abstract :
[en] Ever-growing concerns over ‘Big Brother’ continue driving individuals towards user-centric identity management systems. Nascent innovations are framed as offering Self-Sovereign Identity (SSI). Because of the association with value-laden ideals and technical components like blockchain, SSI is caught up with both hype and idiosyncrasy. Competing interpretations of SSI damage the public discourse and risk misrepresenting affordances these systems might offer. Based on a qualitative inductive interview study and document analysis, this article extrapolates a constructivist theoretical frame – the Extended Model of Interpretive Flexibility – which combines insights from the Social Construction of Technology and the Structurational Model of Technology. The Extended Model of Interpretive Flexibility highlights malleability in the technical implementations and social representations, which in turn is affected by and influences institutional properties around SSI. This research further offers implications for practice around the implementation of SSI, in particular regarding policy, management, and design. For theory on public sector information systems, the proposed model has generalizable potential for the analysis of socio-technical systems and offers future research directions.
Research center :
Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) > FINATRAX - Digital Financial Services and Cross-organizational Digital Transformations
Disciplines :
Business & economic sciences: Multidisciplinary, general & others Sociology & social sciences
Author, co-author :
WEIGL, Linda ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust > FINATRAX > Team Gilbert FRIDGEN
BARBEREAU, Tom Josua ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > FINATRAX
FRIDGEN, Gilbert ; University of Luxembourg > Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SNT) > FINATRAX
External co-authors :
yes
Language :
English
Title :
The construction of self-sovereign identity: Extending the interpretive flexibility of technology towards institutions
This research was funded by the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR) and PayPal PEARL (grant reference 13342933) . For the purpose of open access, the authors have applied a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license to any author accepted manuscript version arising from this submission.
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