Digital sourcing: A discussion of agential, semiotic, infrastructural, combinatorial, and economic shifts

Abstract

For over four decades, a rich body of information systems (IS) sourcing research has examined topics concerning sourcing decisions, governing relationships and performance in various contexts (e.g., outsourcing, multisourcing and offshoring). The last few years have witnessed a significant change in some of the key assumptions in this literature. Organizations and their sourcing practices have been undergoing significant shifts in the digital era, involving not only human but also technology agency (e.g., artificial intelligence), malleable digital assets that can be flexibly recombined (e.g., in platform ecosystems and low-code development), and digital technology that attenuates bounded rationality (e.g., generative artificial intelligence). Such fundamental changes call for the re-examination of such past assumptions in the IS sourcing literature. In this editorial, we discuss the implications of these agential, semiotic, infrastructural, combinatorial, and economic shifts for digital sourcing, that is, research and practice of IS sourcing in the digital era.