Digital responsibility as responsible organizing

ABSTRACT Digital responsibility has become a managerial and societal imperative as digital technologies increasingly function as infrastructures of decision-making that shape access to work, welfare, information, and safety. Although ethical principles for digitalization have largely converged, many organizations struggle to translate values into operational routines, allocate accountability, and learn from emergent harms. Consequently, we argue that digital responsibility is best studied and enacted as responsible organizing, i.e. the (inter-)organizational capability to govern digital systems across their lifecycle in ways that are auditable, contestable, and adaptive. This article develops three distinct arguments to support this direction. First, responsibility becomes consequential only when embedded in situated governance through roles, decision rights, artifacts, and escalation routines. Second, accountability is distributed across supply chains and platforms, requiring boundary-spanning governance mechanisms that can travel across organizational interfaces. Third, responsibility depends on measurement and learning loops that connect ethical intent to observed outcomes.