Unriddling Blockchain: A Study of Outcomes, Tensions, and Governance of Blockchain Implementations

From a theoretical perspective, evidence from scholarly articles suggests how the existing body of research focuses mostly on the architectural aspects related to the technology and therefore, there is a grey area in literature linking blockchain with established theories, frameworks or models (Monrat et al., 2019; Pelt, 2021). Despite blockchain having been in the spotlight for over a decade, there is an ongoing concern on the need to widen the discourse on the topic of blockchain beyond the technical features and performance evaluation (Ølnes et al., 2017; Hughes et al., 2019). More specifically, in the domain of Information Systems (IS) there has been a continues call to look at blockchain from multidisciplinary approaches in an effort to better interpret the benefits and challenges associated with the technology (Ølnes et al., 2017; Risius & Spohrer, 2017). In this regard, research should dwell further into linking blockchain with different levels of analysis including users, platforms, industries (Risius & Spohrer, 2017) and sociocultural patterns (Ghosh, 2019; Rossi et al., 2019). In this regard, more rigorous empirical studies should center around the unexplored avenues in IS research in order to understand better the implications of blockchain and improve our understanding of the technology (Ghosh, 2019; Lu, 2022). Furthermore, blockchain has been regarded as a potential technology with a series of important techno-social implications, nevertheless, the technology should not be considered bulletproof. Research has demonstrated that whilst blockchain provides important technological innovations, its adoption can be very challenging (Batubara et al., 2018; Spahiu et al., 2022). In this regard, many studies have underlined how theorizing on such challenges is still lacking and more empirical investigation is required in order to have a more concrete understanding of the impeding factors (Zheng et al., 2018; Monrat et al., 2019). Although the number of blockchain applications has exponentially increased, many blockchain initiatives are short lived and more result oriented research on successful case studies is required (Rossi et al., 2019; Treiblmaier, 2020), especially with regard to the role of governance where evaluations have been limited (Beck et al., 2018; Pelt et al., 2021; Lumineau et al., 2021). Lastly, blockchain adoption has not been proportionate in every sector, with public domain and public administration showing particularly low rates of adoption, despite factual evidence displaying blockchain’s potential in such areas. In this regard, current studies have only looked at the inherent nature of these domains but make little reference to the potential challenges related to the blockchain attributes (Navadkar et al., 2018; Cagigas et al., 2021).