The Ethics of Social Stratification and the IT User

When investigating the use of information systems within organizations, researchers inevitably make decisions relating to the grouping and classification, or “stratification,” of IT users. Most commonly, users are stratified along functional boundaries or by their membership in various communities of practice. It is important to note, however, that any such method of social stratification necessarily focuses the research on certain issues while unavoidably downplaying or neglecting other concerns. Individuals whose interests, values, or identification align with these neglected issues may be inadvertently marginalized by the research approach. This observation suggests a range of ethical concerns related to the methods of social stratification employed by researchers. In this paper, we argue that that the method by which information systems researchers stratify organizational actors in their research has significant ethical implications. We propose a framework that plots stratification strategies that researchers bring to their analyses using Weber’s theory of stratification and the dimensions of class, status, and party to which we add technological concerns. We offer illustrative theoretical lenses for each category in the framework and demonstrate how each lens favours certain issues and potentially neglects others.