VAR and the Illusion of Objectivity: Technology’s Struggle with Equivocal Realities

Sociotechs

The recent Olympic Games and European Football Championship have highlighted once again the importance, and controversiality, of technologies associated with referee decisions. A Video Assistant Referee, or VAR, is tasked with assisting the referee concerning dubious situations in a sports game. While VAR has become part and parcel of the experience of multiple sports, including football, little is known about the complex sociotechnical fabric that plays out every single time a VAR decision is made. Today we are joined by Stan Karanasios and Bikesh Raj Upreti, respectively Associate Professor and Lecturer in the Department of Business Information Systems at the University of Queensland, who look at “addressing equivocality with technology” by means of VAR. With them, we examine the history of some glaring errors of VAR in football and use that as an entry point to discuss VAR, its genesis, and the sociotechnical profile of a technology that the many sports fans among us witness frequently.

Stan Karanasios is Associate Professor in Information Systems at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland. His research focuses on how digital technology impacts organisations and society, and he has published widely on domains including fintech, the digital transformation of enterprises, and the use of social media platforms in the emergency sector. He is a Senior Editor for Information Systems Journal, an Associate Editor for the European Journal of Information Systems, Section Editor for the Australian Journal on Information Systems, and on the Editorial Board for Mind, Culture & Activity and the International Journal of Information Management.

Bikesh Raj Upreti is a Lecturer in the Department of Business Information Systems at the University of Queensland. He received his PhD from Aalto University, focusing on developing applications to uncover insights from large-scale text data. He researches applied computational methods and quantitative inquiry of inter-disciplinary phenomena, and has applied such analytical tools for large-scale behavioural and predictive analytics set in Information systems, marketing, finance and political discourses.

Resources:

Karanasios, S., Upreti, B., & Iannacci, F. (2023). When Is a Goal a Goal? Addressing Equivocality with Technology. European Conference of Information Systems (ECIS), Kristiansand, 13-16 June 2023, https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2023_rip/10/.