Professor of Commerce
University of Virginia School of Commerce

Faculty Lead, Digital Technology for Democracy Lab
University of Virginia Karsh Institute of Democracy

Faculty Affiliate, Thriving Youth in a Digital Environment
University of Virginia

Steven sitting at his work desk at University of Virginia

Co-Chair, Livable Cville

Co-Curator, Fifeville Neighborhood Art Gallery

Board Member, Jaunt

Board member, Charlottesville Economic Development Authority

Buford precinct co-chair, Cville Dems

Admin, cville.online Mastodon Server

Operator, Fifeville air quality monitor

  • Teach courses including Managerial View of AI (Spring 2025 syllabus) and Multicultural Commerce

  • Read, think, collect and analyze data, write, and do a lot of editing that eventually ends up in published research papers (Google scholar link)

  • Provide service to the Information Systems discipline, including:

    • Senior Editor at Information Systems Research(Eff. July 1, 2026)

    • As Program-Chair for the Communications, Digital Technology, and Organizations (CTO) division of Academy of Management (AOM), manage the Division’s conference program at the 2026 Annual Meeting (e.g., paper, symposium, and poster presentations)

  • As Area Coordinator from May 2021 to May 2025, I provided oversight of faculty affairs, area curricular content, and various administrative and outreach functions for the Information Technology & Innovation Area.

What do I do as an
Associate Professor of Commerce?

walkway of west lawn at UVA with rocking chairs visible

Recent Research Highlights

  • Lusi Yang, Zhiyi Wang, and Steven L. Johnson (forthcoming), “A Generalist Activity Paradox: Individual Performance and Collective Production Efficiency on Open Innovation Platforms.” MIS Quarterly

  • Maggie Zhang, Yang Gao, Jingjing Li, and Steven L. Johnson (forthcoming) “When Influencers Delegate Replies: How Social AI Agents Shape User Engagement.” Information Systems Research, DOI: 10.1287/isre.2025.2270

  • Yash Kumar Atri, Steven L. Johnson, and Thomas Hartvigsen (2026). “Evaluating Temporal Consistency in Multi-Turn Language Models.” The 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2026), San Diego, United States. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2026.acl-long.2133

  • Zhiyi Wang, Steven L. Johnson, and Jungpil Hahn (forthcoming). “Can I Touch Your Code? The Effects of Programming Style on Open Source Software Development.” MIS Quarterly, 1-33. DOI: 10.25300/MISQ/2026/17840

  • Boh, Wai Fong; Melville, Nigel; Baptista, Joao; Chasin, Friedrich; Horita, Flavio; Ixmeier, Anne; Johnson, Steven L.; Ketter, Wolfgang; Kranz, Johann; Miranda, Shaila; Nan, Ning; Pentland, Brian T.; Recker, Jan; Sadeghi, Sepide; Sarker, Saonee; Sarker, Suprateek; Sutanto, Juliana; Wang, Ping; Wilopo, Wahyu (2026). “Digital Resilience for the Climate Crisis: A Multi-Perspective Analysis.” MIS Quarterly, 50(1), 1–34. (Authors listed in alphabetical order, after the two lead authors)

  • Youngwoo Kim, Himanshu Beniwal, Steven L. Johnson, and Thomas Hartvigsen (2025). “Decoding the Rule Book: Extracting Hidden Moderation Criteria from Reddit Communities.” The 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP 2025), Suzhou, China. DOI: 10.18653/v1/2025.emnlp-main.1034

  • Steven L. Johnson (2025). “Limits of Artificial Innovation” in Reia, J., Forelle, MC and Wang, Y. (eds.). Reimagining AI for Environmental Justice and Creativity. Charlottesville, VA: Digital Technology for Democracy Lab, University of Virginia. DOI: 10.18130/03df-zn30

Research Recognition

  • Association for Information Systems
    Distinguished Member, Cum Laude

  • 2021 - Distinguished Winner of “Responsible Research in Management” Award

  • 2021 - Association for Information Systems (AIS) Senior Scholar Best Paper Award

  • 2021 - First Runner-Up AOM OCIS Division Best Published Paper

  • 2021 - University of Virginia Research Achievement Award

  • 2020 - MISQ Best Paper Award

  • 2020 - First Runner-Up AOM OCIS Division Best Published Paper.

  • 2018 - AOM OCIS Division Best Conference Paper Award

  • 2018 - Prix académique de la recherche en management

  • 2015 - OCIS Division Best Published Paper

Teaching

Teaching college students is a true delight! I have taught numerous undergraduate and graduate courses on topics including systems and strategy, business analytics, and information technology management. In Spring, 2025, I will once again teach these courses

Areas of Expertise

  • Online communities, social media, open innovation

  • Social network analysis, computational linguistics, and computational social science

  • Societal impacts of digital technology

  • Platform-mediated communication, content moderation, and context-specific toxic content categorization

  • Bias, fairness, and diversity in platforms, artificial intelligence, and machine learning

My research in published in top IS and management journals

MIS Quarterly,
Organization Science,
Information Systems Research, Information & Organization,
and Harvard Business Review

Research

My research adopts a sociotechnical systems perspective that considers how the intersection of technology, people, processes, and data impacts individuals, organizations, and society. I explore how digital technology enables the discovery, creation, and sharing of information including:

  • In online communities and other social media that support open innovation,

  • Through applications of social network analysis, computational linguistics, and computational social science methods to analyze language use, team dynamics, and large voluntary collectives,

  • In content moderation, toxic content, and algorithmic content prioritization,

  • The role of race, gender, and diversity in algorithms, outcomes, and online experiences, and

  • Societal impacts of digital technology such as information-limiting environments (echo chambers and filter bubbles), the climate crisis, and ethical use of technology.

My ongoing collaborations encompass questions on:

  • How digital technology supports democracy through the distribution and discovery of digital information—including by enabling self-expression, access to high-quality information, connections with others with similar interests, and the voluntary exchange of goods and services.

  • The role of digital technology in healthy youth development, including why and when youth are alternatively benefiting from or harmed by their digital environment.

  • How individuals and organizations can benefit from using AI (including GenAI and LLM); how to minimize bias and promote fairness in AI/ML deployments; and, using LLM for context-aware toxic content identification.

Learn more

  • I live in Charlottesville, Virginia

  • I’ve worked at the University of Virginia since 2015

  • I worked at Temple University from 2008-2015

  • I earned a Ph.D. in Information Systems from the University of Maryland Robert H. Smith School of Business (‘08)

  • Pre-academia, I worked over a decade for a variety of high-tech companies

  • I have a degree in computer science (‘88) and an MBA (‘93) from William & Mary

  • I grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina

A little bit more about me