The digital society

The digitalisation of global society and contemporary culture offers unprecedented opportunities for participation, collaboration, and communication. More particularly, for work, prosperity and entrepreneurship digitalisation provides a broad range of opportunities that affects us both as employees or entrepreneurs and as citizens and consumers. This allows us to rethink notions of prosperity and democracy to include the opportunities afforded by technologies. 

However, the fact that the rules for working and for creating wealth can be and are redefined at a fundamental level is not only good news. Parallel to the development of the new opportunities outlined above, large global players, such as big tech companies and certain powerful nation states, are transforming the global societal ecosystem in a top-down manner that merits rigorous scrutiny. They drive a transformation that renders obsolete many of the guarantees, safeguards and controls concerning work that have been gradually put in place in the past 120 years especially in the EU. These risks manifest themselves, for instance as unfairness, algorithmic discrimination, misinformation, exploitation and alienation. 

This theme asks critical questions that shape the macro approach of SSH-Breed, not only examining societal determinants of prosperity, work and entrepreneurship, but also questioning these concepts themselves and the assumptions that underlie them. Some examples of questions are: What are appropriate normative frameworks to assess the ethics of digitalisation, for instance concerning algorithmic fairness? What challenges does digitalisation pose for the normative theory of the labour market? What is the responsibility of the government, for instance regarding the rapidly expanding platform economy or the existing systems for taxation? What should be expected from the private sector, to make sure that digitalisation acts as an engine for inclusive prosperity? What are the methodological changes needed to address such issues adequately? How do the skills required for professional success and participatory citizenship change? What can be done to mitigate negative effects of digitalisation for the working and non-working population? What is necessary to better reap its possible benefits?