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

    • As Division Chair-Elect for the Communications, Digital Technology, and Organizations (CTO) division of the Academy of Management (AOM), I am a member of the executive committee and will lead the division 2027 Jr. Faculty Consortium in Vienna, Austria.

  • 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.

  • You can learn more about me through these two recent profiles: UVA Sustainability Faces of Sustainability and TYDE Team Spotlight.

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