The year the Academy dropped its theme
The Academy of Management ran its 86th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia this year without a formal theme — an unusual choice from the world's largest community of management scholars, and a revealing one. With no single banner to gather under, the meeting spread out to meet the moment: responsible research, the ethics of automation, and the by-now familiar grand-challenges agenda that has reoriented the field since Ferraro, Etzion and Gehman (2015) and George and colleagues (2016) argued that management must engage the problems that markets and states struggle to solve alone.
Municipalities are where several of those challenges now converge. Artificial intelligence, digital identity, geospatial analytics and data-driven services are redefining how urban institutions operate and how citizens meet the state. The promise is real — mobility, safety, sustainability, inclusion. So is the risk: algorithmic bias, surveillance, data extractivism, and a widening gap between settlements with strong digital capabilities and those without. Our symposium was deliberately co-sponsored by three divisions that seldom sit together — Technology and Innovation Management / CTO, Social Issues in Management, and Organizations and the Natural Environment — because the municipal question refuses to stay inside any one of them.
The framing I opened with, alongside Paul Murphy, was a shift in tense: from the smart city as a noun to governing as a verb. The smart-city agenda promised efficiency and optimization; it delivered vendor-driven deployments and fragmented governance architectures that privilege the centralized efficiency of mega-cities over participation across a region's small and medium settlements. Building on the common-good tradition that Rocha and colleagues (2022) returned to the management conversation — and on work I have developed with Guilherme Tortorella and Héctor Rocha on digital transformation in Latin American cities (2025) — we asked the room to treat digital governance not as a technical add-on but as an institutional design problem oriented toward human dignity.
The smart city was a procurement decision. The human-centered municipality is a governance decision — and management scholarship has been slow to claim it.
Three layers where the common good is won or lost
What held the ninety minutes together was a simple stack. Digital transformation in a municipality is not one thing to govern; it is three, and most institutions invest in the first while neglecting the second, which is exactly where citizen outcomes are decided. We framed it as the human-centered municipal stack, and used it to route the panel's provocations.
Identity, consent, credentials and shared data platforms — the backbone of twenty-first-century public administration, from India's DPI to Buenos Aires' QuarkID. Decisions made here determine whether infrastructure advances inclusion or manufactures new dependency. It is the layer municipalities are most eager to buy.
Algorithmic impact assessments, fairness audits, explainability protocols and human-in-the-loop checkpoints — the institutional capacity to hold an automated decision accountable. Most municipalities run algorithms for routing, allocation and risk scoring with none of it in place. This is the vacuum, and it falls hardest on the marginalized.
Inclusion, dignity, rights and measured public value — across the whole region, not only its mega-city core. The common-good tradition (Aristotle to Aquinas to Tirole, 2016) supplies the normative test: does the system enlarge human flourishing, or optimize a metric at its expense?
So what: the money and the headlines go to Layer 1, but the common good is decided in Layer 2. A municipality can buy world-class digital public infrastructure and still fail its citizens if it cannot audit, explain and override the decisions that infrastructure enables.
Seven vantage points, one municipal question
The strength of the session was its range: purpose theory, urban science, communication, decentralized governance and frontline city practice, from Argentina, Spain, the United States, the United Kingdom and beyond. I grouped the provocations into three tracks — theory, method, and governance-in-practice — and the panel filled each.
Theory — purpose and the common good. Héctor Rocha (IAE Business School) anchored the normative frame: digital governance is a question of institutional purpose, not only performance, and the common-good tradition gives management a language for it that efficiency alone cannot. Esteve Almirall (Esade) brought the scholarly frontier on AI and city systems — where the research is rigorous, where it is thin, and what high-impact journals now expect from work that claims societal relevance. Together they set the bar: reframe smart-city discourse through management theory rather than cede it to engineering and vendors.
Method — measuring what matters. Rishabh S. Chauhan (NYU Tandon, Center for Urban Science and Progress) pressed the measurement problem from the urban-science side: AI decision models for mobility and resilient infrastructure are only as trustworthy as the data and evaluation behind them. Marina Santucci (Universidad Austral) grounded the discussion in the Argentine municipal reality, where the citizen interface — not the model — is where inclusion or exclusion is actually felt. The shared conclusion: existing digital-governance indices rarely capture the socio-technical interdependencies among data, identity, algorithms and citizen experience. The field needs shared ontologies and instruments.
Governance in practice — from pilots to programs. Peter Griffiths (BABLE Smart Cities) brought the practitioner's realism: most smart-city concepts die between the pilot and the program for want of institutional design, not technology. Nikhil Varma (Ramapo College of New Jersey) opened the decentralized-governance question — blockchain and digital identity for participatory budgeting, land registries and trust — and where real adoption actually holds. Francisco Túñez (USAL / Humboldt / CONICET) added the communication and information-governance lens: how algorithmic mediation of the public sphere shapes whether citizens can trust, contest and understand the systems governing them.
From provocation to a research-and-practice agenda
A symposium earns its keep only if it leaves a to-do list. Ours converged on the same discipline I bring to enterprise work: measurement before tooling, governance before scale, and interoperability as the condition for anything to travel. The Global South is not a footnote here but the sharpest test — Latin American municipalities combine resource constraints, social inequality and high digital adoption, which makes them a laboratory for frugal, citizen-centered innovation and, in the same breath, for surveillance and platform dependency. What works in a mega-city rarely survives contact with a small or rural municipality, and the research has barely begun to travel down the settlement hierarchy.
So what: the contribution management scholars can make is not another maturity label. It is the governance layer — audits, rights, measurement, accountable institutional design — that turns a procured platform into public value. From pilot to policy, that is the work.
Governance
Treat algorithmic accountability as municipal infrastructure: impact assessments and fairness audits before deployment, explainability protocols citizens can actually use, and a human-in-the-loop sign-off on irreversible or rights-bearing decisions. Extend the same standard to digital public infrastructure — identity, consent and data platforms such as QuarkID — so inclusion is designed in, not hoped for, and map it to data-protection regimes at the strictest bar.
Metrics
Build shared ontologies and instruments that capture the socio-technical whole, not proxies: an end-to-end digital-service ratio, coverage measured across small and rural settlements rather than the capital alone, identity-attested and auditable decisions, and a recurring citizen trust-and-satisfaction signal. KPIs before APIs — if a municipality cannot measure inclusion, it cannot govern it, and no platform will do that work for it.
Next steps
Now: a post-symposium working group to co-author a research agenda spanning algorithmic audits, digital-rights frameworks and governance models for digital identity. Next: a special issue and a cross-division network bridging TIM/CTO, SIM and ONE, with Global South cases at the center. Later: field partnerships that carry the frameworks into real municipalities — the only test that counts.
The common good is a governance problem, not a technology one.
Philadelphia confirmed something this publication argues each week in the enterprise register: capability is rarely the binding constraint. The models, the identity rails and the data platforms are arriving in municipalities faster than institutions can govern them, and the gap between the two is where citizens are either served or quietly sorted. Management scholarship has spent a decade learning to describe digital transformation. The invitation now is to help govern it — to supply the audits, the rights frameworks, the measurement and the accountable institutional design that a procured platform cannot supply itself.
For Latin America and the wider Global South, this is both opportunity and warning. Our municipalities can leapfrog into frugal, citizen-centered innovation, or they can inherit surveillance and dependency at discount prices. The difference will not be the sophistication of the algorithm; it will be the maturity of the governance around it, and whether that governance reaches the small and rural settlements the mega-city model forgets. My thanks to Héctor Rocha, Marina Santucci, Rishabh S. Chauhan, Peter Griffiths, Esteve Almirall, Francisco Túñez and Nikhil Varma, and to my co-organizer Paul Murphy, for a conversation that treated the municipality as the serious institutional problem it is. From pilot to policy, and KPIs before APIs — interoperability or it doesn't scale.
Continue the conversation
Socradata works with municipalities, public agencies and enterprises across Latin America on human-centered digital governance — algorithmic accountability, digital public infrastructure, and the measurement that turns platforms into public value. If you are building in this space, or want to join the post-symposium working group, I would like to hear from you.