Regulating Emerging Technologies: Prospective Sensemaking through Abstraction and Elaboration

Abstract

Emerging digital technologies require regulation that will avoid harmful effects but that also, ideally, fosters innovation. We report on a case study of how actors, representing a variety of perspectives (legal, regulatory authority, government, industry, and technology), interacted to construct a law on trustworthy technology in the European state of Liechtenstein. This regulatory construction was enabled by collective prospective sensemaking relying on the interrelated processes of abstraction and elaboration, through which actors collectively reconceptualized the regulatory target in terms of the technology (from blockchain to trustworthy technology), its uses (from cryptocurrency to token economy), and required roles (from financial service provider roles to trustworthy technology systems roles). Abstraction allowed the group of actors to extract and generalize essential properties to support the regulatory goals of technology neutrality and innovation-friendliness. Elaboration allowed the group to identify and specify details and requirements to support the regulatory goals of creating legal certainty and protecting users. Through these processes, actors could construct a shared, collective understanding that accommodated various viewpoints and paved the way for writing a law. From this case study, we develop a theory of collective prospective sensemaking in regulating emerging technologies.

Full text

RESEARCH ARTICLE
DOI:10.25300/MISQ/2024/18039
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 pp. 179-204 / March 2025
179
REGULATING EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES: PROSPECTIVE
SENSEMAKING THROUGH ABSTRACTION AND ELABORATION
1
Stefan Seidel
University of Cologne, Cologne, GERMANY {stefan.seidel@wiso.uni-koeln.de}
Christoph J. Frick
University of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, LIECHTENSTEIN {christoph.frick@uni.li}
Jan vom Brocke
University of Muenster, Muenster, GERMANY, and
University of Liechtenstein, Vaduz, LIECHTENSTEIN {jan.vom.brocke@uni-muenster.de}
Emerging digital technologies require regulation that will avoid harmful effects but that also, ideally,
fosters innovation. We report on a case study of how actors, representing a variety of perspectives (legal,
regulatory authority, government, industry, and technology), interacted to construct a law on trustworthy
technology in the European state of Liechtenstein. This regulatory construction was enabled by collective
prospective sensemaking relying on the interrelated processes of abstraction and elaboration, through
which actors collectively reconceptualized the regulatory target in terms of the technology (from
blockchain to trustworthy technology), its uses (from cryptocurrency to token economy), and required
roles (from financial service provider roles to trustworthy technology systems roles). Abstraction allowed
the group of actors to extract and generalize essential properties to support the regulatory goals of
technology neutrality and innovation-friendliness. Elaboration allowed the group to identify and specify
details and requirements to support the regulatory goals of creating legal certainty and protecting users.
Through these processes, actors could construct a shared, collective understanding that accommodated
various viewpoints and paved the way for writing a law. From this case study, we develop a theory of
collective prospective sensemaking in regulating emerging technologies.
Keywords: Technology regulation, prospective sensemaking, sensemaking, institutional construction,
emerging technology, blockchain, token economy
Introduction
Emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI),
blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT) can create
regulatory gaps, such as when they allow new practices or
present the possibility of new consequences (Mandel, 2009).
This issue can require constructing new regulatory institutions
or adjusting those that already exist (Beaumier et al., 2020;
Scherer, 2015; Székely et al., 2011). A key challenge in
regulating emerging technologies lies in avoiding harmful
1
Eivor Oborn was the accepting senior editor for this paper. Lisen Selander served as the associate editor. Transparency materials are available at
https://osf.io/y698b/
©2025. The Authors. This work is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0 License
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)
effects and ensuring the technology is deployed in a socially
desirable way (Braun & Wield, 1994) while also being
innovation friendly (Butenko & Larouche, 2015; Butler et al.,
2023; Finck, 2018; Henningsson & Eaton, 2023; Mandel,
2009). Accomplishing this dual goal is particularly difficult
when the technology’s prospects and potential uses are unclear
at the time of regulation (Bennett Moses, 2013; Collingridge,
1980; Finck, 2018). The fast pace and unbounded nature of
technological development (Grover & Lyytinen, 2023)
challenge established regulatory processes (Brownsword, 2020;

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
180
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
Brownsword et al., 2017), which are typically slow-paced and
territorially bounded (Beaumier et al., 2020). Governments are
typically “behind the curve of technology (compared to
industry)” (Wiener, 2004, p. 489). The time lag that may result
provides a “gray” space for experimenting with new business
models (Hinings et al., 2018).
Therefore, a central question concerns how lawmakers can
create regulations that are specific enough to support
appropriate control but also flexible and general enough to
allow for a technology’s future development and to cope with
technological change and innovation. In regulation’s broadest
sense, it seeks to maintain a system’s desired state (Braun &
Wield, 1994); it is a core means of controlling technology and
behavior associated with that technology to avoid risk and
societal as well as environmental damage (Braun & Wield,
1994) through rules or restrictions (Koops, 2006). Regulation
can take different forms, including government regulation, self-
regulation, and market regulation (Koops, 2006). Different
regulatory designs can shape technological development in
ways that impede or stimulate change, such as when specific
command-and-control technological requirements may lead to
the diffusion of existing technology but prevent innovation, or
when setting performance standards while allowing for
flexibility as to “how” these standards are met can foster
innovation (Wiener, 2004). Key elements of regulations are the
laws and bylaws that legislatures pass, the orders issued by
ministers or local authorities that specify details, and the
assignment of agencies that are responsible for day-to-day
enforcement (Braun & Wield, 1994).
Two broad options that have been suggested in this context are
technology neutrality and technology specificity (Greenberg,
2015; Reed, 2007). Technology neutrality refers to regulating
technology in such way that is does not discriminate against any
specific technology and can apply to both offline and online
technologies (Koops, 2006). It is widely adopted in law-
making, including in the European Union (EU) and the United
States (US), and is intended to make room for technological
development and innovation (Reed, 2007; Székely et al., 2011).
The US Government’s Framework for Global Electronic
Commerce states that “rules should be technology-neutral (i.e.,
the rules should neither require nor assume a particular
technology) and forward looking (i.e., the rules should not
hinder the use or development of technologies in the future)”
(The White House, 1997). The EU has described the goals of
the AI Act similarly: “Parliament … wants to establish a
technology-neutral, uniform definition for AI that could be
applied to future AI systems” (European Parliament, 2023a).
Technology specificity, which argues for regulating specific
technologies individually, highlights that technology
2
The research question was adjusted during the course of the qualitative,
exploratory study, but it remains aligned with the overall goal of
understanding the regulatory process.
neutrality may not be desirable because, for example, it cannot
be specific about what it regulates, which may lead to
unintended consequences. Technology neutrality also may not
be feasible because, for example, regulators do not fully
understand the technology and judges will eventually have to
conceptualize the technology in court (Greenberg, 2015;
Koops, 2006; Reed, 2007).
Constructing an agreement on how an emerging technology
should be regulated, including the degree to which it should
be technology-neutral or technology-specific, is not an easy
task. Regulating emerging technologies is an act of
institutional construction (Scott, 2014) that involves multiple
actors or agents (Colomy, 1998; Fligstein, 1997; Kokshagina
et al., 2023) whose perspectives can differ (Chan & Bennett
Moses, 2017). The state plays a dominant role in technology
regulation, but other actors can also be involved (Gornitzka &
Sverdrup, 2008; Rasmussen & Toshkov, 2013). This can be
expert groups that represent stakeholder groups and associated
perspectives, such as regulatory agencies, industry
representatives, scientists, environmental organizations, and
public interest groups (Mandel, 2009). These actors must
collectively make sense (Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012; Weick et
al., 2005) to move from multiple and sometimes conflicting
points of view to some shared understanding of the regulatory
target. A key challenge is that emerging technologies are
equivocal because they evoke or are associated with multiple,
conflicting interpretations (Berente et al., 2011; Weick, 1990).
Therefore, we ask: How do actors who are involved in
developing regulatory frameworks make sense of emerging
and equivocal technologies so as to regulate them?
2
In seeking answers to this question, we conducted an in-
depth exploratory case study of the process of making a law
on trustworthy technology in the European nation-state of
Liechtenstein. The process started with the intention to
regulate blockchain technology but eventually led to making
a law on tokens and trustworthy technology service
providers. Our focus was on the country’s process of
developing the regulatory framework to the point at which it
was discussed in Parliament and passed as a law. We
conducted interviews with the key individuals involved in
the process’s various stages, from forming a working group
of experts in response to regulatory pressure and stakeholder
interests to iteratively developing a new regulatory
framework to writing the law. Respondents represented a
variety of perspectives, including those of the prime
minister, lawyers, technical experts, and industry
professionals. We also referred to key government and
public documents, including concepts, strategy papers,
working group documents, political reports, and the

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
181
evolving text of the law itself, including annotations and
comments, all of which provided insight into the law-making
process throughout its stages over time.
Our theoretical contribution involves highlighting how
collective prospective sensemaking around emerging
technologies relies on the interrelated processes of abstraction
and elaboration, with which actors collectively and discursively
extract and generalize essential properties (abstraction) and
specify details and requirements (elaboration). If applied in the
context of technology regulation, abstraction and elaboration
move the regulatory process from one conceptualization to
another and allow actors to construct shared meaning, so they
are critical elements in institutionalizing regulations for
equivocal and emerging technologies.
This article proceeds as follows. First, we elaborate on our
theoretical lens of collective prospective sensemaking. Then we
describe our research method. Next, we discuss our case
analysis in two steps: the description of the context and the
overall temporal development, followed by our analysis of how
actors constructed meaning through prospective collective
sensemaking and how they encoded this meaning in a
regulatory framework. Our penultimate discussion section
develops a process model of regulating emerging technologies.
Finally, we highlight the study’s implications for research and
practice and conclude by pointing out the study’s limitations
and making some final remarks.
Collective Prospective Sensemaking
About Emerging Technologies
Understanding emerging and equivocal technologies requires
sensemaking (Berente et al., 2011; Mesgari & Okoli, 2019)—
the process through which individuals and groups interpret
novel and ambiguous situations by identifying and bracketing
cues, creating intersubjective meaning, and enacting this
meaning (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014; Weick, 1995; Weick et
al., 2005). Three aspects of sensemaking are of particular
importance when actors seek to understand emerging and
equivocal technologies so as to regulate them: Regulatory
sensemaking involves both individual actors and collectives,
sensemaking about emerging technologies is discursive, and
sensemaking about emerging technologies is both retrospective
and prospective.
First, since regulatory sensemaking involves both individual
actors and collectives, it can be viewed as both a cognitive
process, emphasizing the role of the individual actor (Dervin,
1999; Klein et al., 2006; Louis, 1980), and a social process that
puts the collective in the foreground (Maitlis et al., 2013;
Weick, 1995; Weick et al., 2005). We study sensemaking as a
social process in which individual actors, each with their own
perspectives and goals, collectively create meaning around an
emerging technology (Gattringer et al., 2021) to construct a
regulatory framework. While we consider the unique
viewpoints of individual actors, making a law is a consensus-
seeking process that can succeed only if shared, collective
meaning is created.
Second, discourse is central for sensemaking to create
intersubjective meaning (Berente et al., 2011; Gephart et al.,
2012; Weick et al., 2005). Weick (1995, p. 18) aptly highlighted
the role of language in sensemaking: “How can I know what I
think until I see what I say?”—a slight adaptation of the phrase
he attributes to Graham Wallas. Next to conversational
practices, collective sensemaking involves the use of artifacts,
including a variety of visual and textual forms that allow actors
to articulate their assumptions and beliefs, represent aspects of
their thinking that they deem to be relevant, elaborate on their
understanding, and construct shared meaning (Stigliani &
Ravasi, 2012). This is of particular importance when
constructing a law, because the outcome of this process is an
artifact (the law text), that represents the shared meaning that
the legislature eventually passes (Kosti et al., 2019).
Third, despite the early tendency of the sensemaking literature
to focus on retrospection (Weick, 1995; Weick & Meader,
1993), sensemaking is also prospective (Bolander & Sandberg,
2013; Corley & Gioia, 2011; Gioia, 2006; Gioia & Chittipeddi,
1991; Gioia et al., 2002; Thomas et al., 1993; Weick et al.,
2005) or future-oriented (Gephart et al., 2012; Stigliani &
Ravasi, 2012). On the one hand, when making sense of a
situation, actors build on previous experiences (Weick, 1979),
including their experiences with the emerging technology as
well as other technologies. On the other hand, sensemaking
allows actors to engage in forward-looking thinking (Friesl et
al., 2019; Gattringer et al., 2021; Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012),
which is key to a regulatory effort that seeks not only to regulate
the status quo but also to regulate future developments of an
emergent and equivocal technology like blockchain (Finck,
2018; Greenberg, 2015).
Research Method
We conducted a single in-depth case study, drawing on
techniques from the grounded theory method (Strauss &
Corbin, 1998) to build theory, particularly process theory
(Langley, 1999). Single case studies allow researchers to
develop a deep understanding of a phenomenon in its socially
embedded context and to study novel and emergent phenomena
(e.g., Davidson & Chismar, 2007). We had access to a unique
site and data that allowed us to study regulatory sensemaking
around emerging technologies in depth and give consideration

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
182
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
to multiple viewpoints (e.g., Cross et al., 1997; Silva &
Hirschheim, 2007). Our main data sources were government
documents and interviews with key actors involved in the
regulatory effort. The interviews allowed us to understand the
law-making process from the perspectives of those involved
(Rubin & Rubin, 2012), including what they deemed to be
important about the technology and how they saw the
understanding of the regulatory target evolving over time.
Time-stamped documents were especially helpful in
constructing a time-ordered account of events (Langley, 1999).
They also provided insights into how collective meaning was
constructed over time, as these documents reflected the
conceptualizations of the technology at various points in time.
To ensure transparency, we provide additional information
about our data collection and analysis on an open science server
at https://osf.io/y698b/.
Case Setting and Technology
The nature of blockchain as an emerging technology and the
opportunity to observe multiple actors involved in constructing
a regulatory framework for it in Liechtenstein made the case
well suited to a study of regulatory sensemaking around
emerging and equivocal technologies.
Located in central Europe, Liechtenstein offers a high standard
of living, a strong overall economy, and a particularly strong
financial sector. The country’s strong financial sector and its
government’s awareness of the need to strengthen the country’s
ability to innovate in light of emerging financial technologies
(fintech) in the context of the highly regulated nature of
financial markets made blockchain a focus. However,
Liechtenstein had no formal regulatory framework for
blockchain technology, as was also the case in most other
countries, so we were in a position to observe the construction
process of a novel regulatory framework. Actors at the
government level and innovators, including technology
enthusiasts who were interested in the new technology, both
identified a regulatory gap when they discovered blockchain’s
innovation potential and that the existing regulations were not
sufficient. Multiple actors whose perspectives and goals
differed participated in the process.
Blockchain is an emerging technology that has the potential to
change business transactions (Finck, 2018; Herian, 2018;
Kiviat, 2015), including monetary processes (Tsukerman,
2015), in general, along with other uses (Beck et al., 2018;
Mendling et al., 2018). Blockchain can be considered a
“tamper-resistant database of transactions consistent across a
large number of nodes” that increases trust, as it is
cryptographically secured against manipulation (Beck, 2018,
p. 55). However, blockchain’s potential cannot be fully
anticipated (Beck et al., 2018): While the technology has its
roots in its use for cryptocurrencies, notably Bitcoin (Nofer et
al., 2017), it has broad applicability in representing all sorts of
assets through tokens. Such is the foundation of the token
economy, where a token—a piece of information—can
represent a variety of assets (Chen, 2018). Therefore, what
products, services, processes, and business models blockchain
technology will eventually enable is not predictable (Finck,
2018). As a result, regulatory bodies like governments must
anticipate the actionable spaces that this technology may
provide, as well as the consequences of such provision (Finck,
2018; Herian, 2018; Kiviat, 2015). At the same time, business
organizations require regulatory frames if they are to make
decisions about investments and change their work practices
and business models. In short, they need legal certainty
(Finck, 2018).
Data Collection
We collected data between April 2019 and December 2022.
The main phase of our data collection took place between April
2019 and July 2019, but in the spirit of theoretical sampling
(Strauss & Corbin, 1998) inquiries continued as we analyzed
our data, sampled documents from available data sources, and
conducted confirmatory interviews in 2021 and 2022. Our
primary data source in the first phase was the semi-structured,
open-ended, retrospective interviews with those individuals
who were directly involved in the process of creating the law.
We conducted 20 interviews with 20 unique respondents (Table
1) and three follow-up confirmatory interviews with three key
respondents. The length of the interviews averaged 50 min 18 s
and ranged from 25 min 14 s to 92 min 2 s. The interviews
involved participants who represented key perspectives:
technology experts from the emerging crypto ecosystem and
legal, financial market supervision, government, and industry
professionals. Key questions addressed the goals, process, and
results of the regulatory process from the respondents’ points of
view. As Table 1 shows, these actors were part of a core
working group or an extended working group or participated in
the process in various other capacities. We explain the role of
each of these groups later in our analysis section. The sample
represented the key actors involved in the process, including all
members of the core working group and the extended working
group, as well as other key individuals. Among the interviewees
were the prime minister, an employee of a ministerial unit, a
member of the executive board of the financial market
authority, key legal advisors, and technical experts. When
conducting the interviews, we used an interview protocol as a
guide but made adjustments to consider and understand each
actor’s idiosyncratic role and perspective in the process. We
provide additional information about how we gained access to
the case site and identified key informants as well as about the
interviews and interview settings and how interviews were
adjusted at https://osf.io/y698b/.

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
183
Table 1. Respondents
Respondent
Group membership
No. of
interviews
ID
Organization
Role
Perspective
Core
working
group
Extended
working
group
Other
1
Financial market
authority
Executive
Regulatory authority
x
x
2
2
Law firm
Founder, executive,
lawyer
Legal, technology
expert
x
x
2
3
Trust company
Owner, lawyer
Industry, legal
x
x
1
4
Crypto association
Board member
Industry, professional
association
x
1
5
University
Professor
Academic (law)
x
1
6
Bank
Financial markets
executive
Industry
x
1
7
Law firm
Founder, executive,
lawyer
Legal
x
1
8
Crypto company
Executive
Industry
x
1
9
University
Professor
Academic (law)
x
1
10
Tax consultancy
company
Founder, executive
Industry
x
1
11
Crypto company
Founder, executive
Industry, technology
expert
x
x
1
12
Law firm
Executive, lawyer
Legal
x
1
13
Law firm
Founder, executive,
lawyer
Legal
x
1
14
Crypto company
Founder, executive
Industry, legal
x
1
15
Ministerial unit
Employee
Government
x
x
2
16
Crypto company
Executive
Industry
x
1
17
Crypto company
Founder, executive
Industry, technology
expert
x
x
1
18
Crypto association,
crypto company
Board member,
executive
Industry, professional
association
x
1
19
Crypto association,
crypto company
Board member,
executive
Industry, professional
association
x
1
20
Government
Prime minister
Government
x
1
Totals
6
10
10
23
Official government papers—concept and strategy papers and
other documents related to the project—helped us get a
comprehensive picture of how the process unfolded. We sampled
from nearly 1,000 documents for those that we expected would
help us develop our emergent concepts and move toward theory.
Our complete sample consisted of 19 hr 17 min of interview data,
1,688 A4 pages of documents, and 286 PowerPoint slides (i.e., a
total number of 1,974 document pages). Table 2 provides an
overview of the documents we analyzed.
Data Analysis
We conducted four rounds of coding with the first two authors
3
performing the coding process and one or the other taking the
3
The second author’s position as a government official (advisor to the prime
minister) enabled access to respondents and data, as well as the acquisition of the
required permissions for its use, but did not involve active participation in
constructing the law; he thus took an observational role for the purpose of our
study. However, he was continuously informed about the process and
lead in each of the four key coding stages. The two authors held
regular meetings to review the coding, discuss emergent codes,
and resolve any disagreements to reach a consensus. By
comparing and contrasting codes with empirical data (Strauss
& Corbin, 1998), they reached consensus in all instances. In this
process, they created, densified, and reordered more than 200
codes. We used the ATLAS.ti software (first in Version 8 and
later in Version 9) to facilitate the coding process, Excel to
create tabular displays of data and analyses, PowerPoint to
visualize data and findings and develop conceptual ideas, Word
to record and develop ideas, and Python scripts to query
documents. We provide additional information about the
coding process at https://osf.io/y698b/.
coordinated related government communication with political parties and the
public, enabling the research team to make informed sampling decisions. The
involvement of the two analysts (the first and second authors) helped mitigate
potential researcher bias. Additional details about the second author’s position
and role are available at https://osf.io/y698b/.

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
184
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
Table 2. Documents Analyzed (sampled from approx. 1000 documents)
Document type
Description
Sampled
documents
Concepts
Documents that highlight and discuss elements of the regulatory effort
7
Strategy documents
Documents that highlight strategic decisions, such as alternative options
throughout the process
5
Working group documents
Documents used in the core working group and extended working group
to facilitate the process
6
Report and proposal /
emerging law text
Evolving versions of the law text, sometimes including an explanatory
part preceding the law and including feedback and opinion provided by
stakeholders throughout the law-making process; the law text was the
central evolving artifact
14
Overview of feedback
received
A list that summarized the feedback received on the proposed law
1
Government programs and
reports
Overall program published by the government, providing a sense of the
external perception of the process
7
Communications and media
Communication about the law-making process, for instance, through
speeches, interviews, and press releases
12
Parliamentary protocol
Decision protocol of the parliamentary process
2
First Round of Coding: Identifying the Overall
Process
Open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998) soon produced more
than 100 codes. The first two authors’ review of these codes
pointed to several emergent themes, particularly the temporal
development from a more specific (albeit still vague)
understanding of “regulating cryptocurrencies” to the more
abstract and general understanding of “making a law for the
token economy.” We noticed that this shift resulted from the
working group members’ interactions with each other, their
interactions with other actors, and a process that could be best
described in terms of sensemaking and the formation of shared
collective meaning. The open coding soon overlapped with
axial coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1998), where we began to
identify major categories and to code around the “axes” of these
categories; that is, we started to identify relationships. While we
were sensitized by the coding paradigm suggested by Strauss
and Corbin (1998), which suggests using the categories of
phenomenon, causal conditions, intervening conditions,
contextual conditions, action/interaction strategies, and
consequences to identify relationships, we only used these ideas
as a jumping-off point to avoid force-fitting data (Seidel &
Urquhart, 2013). In particular, our coding revolved around the
idea of “prospective sensemaking” as the process by which
actors sought to understand and anticipate the materiality (in
terms of features) and potential uses of blockchain technology.
Therefore, we decided on our theoretical lens of sensemaking
to analyze how actors tried to comprehend, explain, and predict
the role and implications of blockchain technology and to
construct shared meaning (Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012; Thomas et
al., 1993; Weick et al., 2005). In the grounded and exploratory
spirit of this study, we used sensemaking as a “sensitizing
device” (Klein & Myers, 1999). That is, to allow for codes to
emerge, we allowed ourselves to be sensitized by ideas from
sensemaking theory (such as triggered by ambiguity, involving
labeling) rather than applying preconceived concepts to our data
(Strauss & Corbin, 1998). The key elements that informed our
analyses were our conception of prospective sensemaking as an
individual and collective, discursive, and prospective process
by which actors create meaning around emerging technologies
to regulate them. Throughout the process of analyzing our data,
we considered other lenses, like institutional entrepreneurship
theory and stakeholder theory, but we settled on sensemaking
because it allowed us to attend to how actors who represented
various perspectives were involved in assigning meaning to the
emergent technology. We considered this lens to be suitable
because, more than other lenses we considered, it highlighted
how actors collectively moved through a discursive process
from an ambiguous understanding related to “regulating
blockchain” to a conceptual understanding of making a law on
tokens and trustworthy technology service providers, thereby
considering the prospective nature of the regulatory effort.
Second Round of Coding: Focus on Prospective
Sensemaking
We recoded our data set with a focus on sensemaking and
noticed that the sensemaking-related codes fit into three
categories: making sense of materiality, making sense of

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
185
use/potentials, and making sense of required regulation.
4
These
categories helped us to conceptually describe the sensemaking
process that we saw as revolving around key elements of the
regulatory target in terms of the technology itself (asking and
answering questions about what is the technology of interest),
the technology’s uses (asking what can be done with the
technology, that is, its outcomes), and the required roles (who
should be regulated and in what capacity, that is, behaviors and
related responsibilities and obligations). As in the first round of
coding, we remained open to discovering something new in the
data while we focused on axial coding around the three
emergent categories. Table 3 provides examples from this stage
of coding. The table also illustrates the general logic of our
concept formation, whereby we moved from lower-level codes
to more abstract concepts that provide the foundation for
developing an integrated theoretical scheme (Saldaña, 2009).
Third Round of Coding: Focus on Abstraction
Our coding allowed us to identify how actors reconceptualized
the regulatory target in terms of the technology and its features
(i.e., the technology’s specific design), its uses, and its
associated roles (i.e., the roles to be regulated). We noticed that,
over time, the actors’ understanding of these elements became
more abstract—as a result of extracting common features and
properties to identify the “common core or essence” of those
elements (Kramer, 2007, p. 38)—and thus became more
generally applicable. Therefore, we embarked on a third round
of coding, where we focused on how actors developed an
increasingly abstract understanding of the technology, its uses,
and the associated roles. Key concepts around which we coded
were abstraction of materiality (which later became abstraction
of technology), abstraction of use, and abstraction of roles. At
this point, we also detailed our understanding of the temporal
development of how the actors made sense of the technology.
Comparing the temporal development of events provided in the
documents with what we learned from the interviews gave us
insight into how the meaning associated with the technology
evolved over time. We based our differentiation of phases on
the actors who were involved in each phase, the start and end
events, and the outcomes of those phases. We used time-
ordered displays to describe the chronological flow of events
(Miles et al., 2013) and how meaning associated with the
project evolved over time. In so doing, we identified three key
phases that relied on sensemaking around the emergent and
equivocal technology: closed-circle sensemaking among the
initial working group of six actors, extended-circle sensemaking
4
Making sense of materiality, making sense of use/potentials, and making
sense of required regulation were the notions we used at this stage of the
coding, but our final theoretical model distinguishes the level of technology,
the level of use, and the level of roles. We used “making sense of regulation”
early but then changed this code into “making sense of roles” because the
regulatory statements that we heard from respondents and identified in the
to consider a broader variety of views, and regulatory
implementation, including parliamentary debate and passage of
the law. We identified the roles that the actors played in each
phase and located how actors reconceptualized the technology
in these phases. Table 4 shows how the documents we analyzed
were distributed across the three phases.
Fourth Round of Coding: Further Unpacking
Iterative Reconceptualizations
While we understood how the process unfolded over time, we
needed to know more about how, specifically, actors
reconceptualized the technology, so we recoded the documents,
as they reflected the intermediate results from the sensemaking
process and provided insight into the detailed changes in meaning
that the working group and, later, the extended working group
constructed. Some of these documents contained annotations and
comments from the actors involved. For this exercise, we used
tabular displays as well as visualizations to identify how the
technology, its uses, and its associated roles were considered in
each of the documents and to describe to the extent possible each
reconceptualization in terms of the conceptualization before and
after the reconceptualization as well as the underlying rationale.
We analyzed how these developments were reflected in the law
in its versions over time. This is also when we elevated
elaboration—one salient element next to abstraction—to the level
of a concept. While it had been clear since early in the analytical
process that abstraction was accompanied by ongoing
elaborations in the sense of specifying what mattered from a
regulatory point of view, it was the detailed analysis of the
conceptual understanding before reconceptualizing elements of
the regulatory target and after reconceptualizing elements of the
regulatory target that allowed us to highlight how specifically
abstraction and elaboration constituted an iterative and
intertwined process that produced reconceptualizations that led to
two observed conceptual shifts that we describe in detail later.
This is when we noticed that the collective prospective
sensemaking we observed relied on the interrelated processes of
abstraction and elaboration, which, over time, produced novel
conceptualizations of the technology. We then also recoded the
interviews with a focus on those elaborations. By corroborating
the analysis of the documents using the findings from our
interviews, we developed a detailed overview of the specific
reconceptualizations that led to the two major conceptual shifts,
each involving a number of interrelated abstractions and
elaborations of the regulatory target.
documents mainly addressed roles that were related to the technology. We
used “making sense of materiality” to address how actors collectively made
sense of the technology’s material aspects but then changed this code into
“making sense of technology” because we felt it appropriately captured the
sensemaking that occurred around the technology in a narrower sense
(blockchain, distributed ledger technology, trustworthy technology).

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
186
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
Table 3. Emergent Categories and Example Codes
Emergent category
Example codes
Example quotations from participants
Making sense of
use/potentials
Anticipating blockchain market potential
Assessing the market potential “is extremely
difficult. I think that, to a large extent, if we
speak about the financial sector, value
generation will not significantly increase. The
financial sector will adopt the new
technologies to replace old ones”
(Respondent 1).
Anticipating blockchain use
“For industry, blockchain is mainly interesting
in the area of supply chain management”
(Respondent 3).
Table 4. Documents by Phase
Data
Phase 1:
Closed circle sensemaking
(Aug. 2016 –Aug. 2017)
Phase 2:
Extended circle sensemaking
(Sept. 2017–Aug. 2018)
Phase 3:
Regulatory implementation
(Sept. 2018–Dec. 2019)
Number of
documents
10
23
21
Number of
pages
176
(67 A4 pages, 109 PowerPoint
Slides)
748
(608 A4 pages, 140 PowerPoint
Slides)
1,050
(1,013 A4 pages, 37 PowerPoint
Slides)
Theoretical Integration
As we moved through the coding process and identified
concepts and developed further concepts, we constructed an
increasingly coherent understanding of how the sensemaking
process unfolded. Our lens of prospective sensemaking
allowed us to integrate our findings theoretically by focusing
on how meaning was created through a collective, discursive,
and prospective process. We used textual and visual
descriptions to iterate through the data, refine our
understanding, move toward an integrated theoretical scheme,
and arrive at an explanation of the regulatory process in terms
of collective prospective sensemaking, relying on the
processes of abstraction and elaboration that revolved around
the technology, its uses, and its associated roles.
Case Description
The Context
In the second half of 2014, Liechtenstein’s prime minister and
the Ministry of General Government Affairs and Finance,
launched an initiative, “Impuls Liechtenstein,” to create an
innovation-friendly context that would enable various sectors
to create opportunities through institutionalized innovation
processes (“impulses”) and address the dynamics in the
financial services sector that result from digitalization and
increasing competition between geographic and political
locations. One key element was so-called innovation clubs,
where citizens could follow a formal application process to
approach the Ministry of General Government Affairs and
Finance with innovative ideas in a direct way. Innovation
clubs were started for, among other things, topics related to
digital finance, an e-currency institute, a framework for a
cryptofinance system, regulation of virtual currencies in
Liechtenstein, and a blockchain-based currency in
Liechtenstein. These initiatives led to the foundation of the
Regulatory Lab—a fintech competence center at the financial
market authority—and, eventually, the core working group
that was tasked with developing a regulatory framework for
blockchain technology. Blockchain technology was a key
topic for ideas proposed to the Ministry of General
Government Affairs and Finance.
Our analysis suggests that the initiative had two central
interrelated triggers: Regulatory demand and stakeholder
interests. Regulatory demand occurred as stakeholders like
industry representatives perceived that the existing regulatory
framework did not address blockchain technology
sufficiently, creating uncertainty about actions they may

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
187
undertake. They demanded the construction of a regulatory
framework that would allow them to act legitimately. In an
interview, a government official said:
5
Through our engagement with companies, we learned
that they saw considerable uncertainty [regarding
blockchain technology]. Imagine that, as a company,
you wanted to implement a business idea, and this idea
is so new that the current law does not tell you whether
it is possible. You then start interpreting the law, and
the government agencies also interpret the law, which
creates uncertainty and inertia because everyone
needs to think about how this new idea can be
implemented. (Respondent 15)
The absence of regulation began to play a practical role as
business organizations sought to implement new business
ideas around blockchain technology, but how they could gain
legitimacy for novel business models remained unclear.
Various stakeholders found potential uses and business
models for the new technology that reflected their interests,
and the government wanted to create jobs and a new branch
of value creation around the new technology. In an interview,
a representative of a regulatory agency said: “Eventually, the
goal is to create something economically, to create jobs, to
allow for the creation of value” (Respondent 1).
An interviewee who had deep knowledge about the crypto
ecosystem highlighted how experiences from other countries
made clear that a lack of regulatory framework could prevent
projects from being executed:
I think that the topic was taken up because, in
Switzerland, some projects could not be continued
because the country’s legal limits were reached and
because some legal advisory in Switzerland was fully
occupied, and people turned to alternative
jurisdictional areas. … Then some projects came to
Liechtenstein. … This raised a number of legal
questions. (Respondent 3)
Multiple stakeholders shared an interest in providing
legitimacy and legal security for business models around
blockchain technology. Against this background, with the
support of the prime minister, six key experts in the fields of
law, financial market supervision, government, industry, and
technology formed a temporary working group to address the
issue and develop a new regulatory framework.
5
All quotations used in this paper from the interviews as well as the
documents we analyzed (except the translation of the final legal text) are
translated from German, the language spoken in the country we studied.
Key Phases
The process of making a blockchain law can be described as
a sequence of interrelated phases (Langley, 1999) based on the
occurrence of certain events (Abbott, 1990). We constructed a
temporal order of how the case developed along three key
phases: closed-circle sensemaking, extended-circle
sensemaking, and regulatory implementation (Table 5).
Our analysis focuses on the first two stages, where the shared
meaning that enabled the creation of a law that Parliament later
passed was developed. However, we also considered the third
stage, which occurred because of the preceding sensemaking
process and completed our understanding of the overall
conceptual development. We established these stages by
identifying key activities and events, outcomes, and the actors
involved. While these elements provide the foundation for a
relatively clear-cut sequential process, the process within those
phases was highly iterative, as key actors sought to create
shared understanding and meaning. Still, making a law requires
certain key elements, including a consultation process and
certain formal steps when the law is brought before Parliament
for passage.
Phase 1 (closed-circle sensemaking): Phase 1 started in the
second half of 2016, when the Ministry of General Government
Affairs and Finance, under the direct leadership of the prime
minister, created a working group of six members who
represented key perspectives. (See Table 1, some actors
represented multiple perspectives.) The group of experts was
tasked with developing a vision for cryptocurrency and
blockchain technology that would help in creating a regulatory
framework. The working group held four meetings and
provided a sensemaking space where actors could reconcile
their various perspectives, understand the many aspects of
blockchain technology, and move toward a shared mental
model. As the CEO of a blockchain start-up noted:
It started at a time when knowledge about blockchain
was not widespread and each of us had different views
…. We defined quite a lot … What is a token? How do
we define a private key? How do we define a public key?
This whole definitional part, which perhaps now reads
relatively barren and sounds simplistic compared to
today’s knowledge, and writing all of this down,
required hours of meetings and repeated starts and
restarts only to define what a token is. (Respondent 17)

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
188
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
Table 5. Temporal Development, Key Events, Actors Involved, and Outcomes
Phase 1:
Closed-circle
sensemaking
Phase 2:
Extended-circle
sensemaking
Phase 3:
Regulatory
implementation
Time frame
Aug. 2016–Aug. 2017
Sept. 2017–Aug. 2018
Sept. 2018–Dec. 2019
Key
activities
and events
The ministry recognizes a need
for regulation of
cryptocurrencies and blockchain
manifested in a regulatory
blockchain and cryptocurrency
concept.
(August 2016)
Five meetings of the core
working group explore
regulation of cryptocurrencies
and blockchain technology.
(November 2016–April 2017)
Over time, conceptual evolution
from the regulation of
cryptocurrencies and blockchain
to the decision to make a law,
manifested in a program about
innovation and cryptofinance
systems, takes place.
(April 2017)
The government commissions a first
draft of a report and proposal on a
law on cryptofinance system.
(November 2017)
Prime minister announces law-
making process in public speech.
(March 2018)
Working group is tasked with
developing a law.
(March 2018)
Three meetings of an extended
working group take place to address
conceptual development of the
report and proposal, the law and the
consultation report, summarized in a
protocol.
(March 2018–May 2018)
Press conference and
presentation of the law with the
official start of the consultation
report take place.
(August 2018)
Consultation and political
lobbying related to the law
begin.
(August 2018)
The government approves the
proposal on the law for
submission to Parliament.
(May 2019)
Results and start of legislative
process in Parliament are
communicated.
(May 2019)
Parliamentary debates and
enactment of the law take
place.
(June and October 2019)
Key actors
Government, ministry, core
working group
Government, ministry, extended
working group
Ministry, government,
Parliament
Key outcome
Concept for innovation and
cryptofinancial systems
(April 2017)
Consultation report on the law on
trustworthy technology-based
transaction systems (Blockchain Act;
VT Act; VTG)
(May 2018)
Law of 3 October 2019 on
Tokens and TT Service
Providers (Token and TT
Service Provider Act; TVTG)
(October 2019)
This process of collective sensemaking over an extended
period was facilitated by two interrelated elements: the
heterogeneity of perspectives and time to work outside day-
to-day business. The heterogeneity of perspectives addressed
the complex challenges involving business, legal, and
technological issues, as various viewpoints could come
together so sensemaking could occur at a collective level. As
a respondent who represented the industry perspective and
had in-depth knowledge of the regulatory context highlighted:
“Good laws have originated from work in teams—people
from the authorities and the economy, and perhaps some
external consultants” (Respondent 3).
The working group also had time to work in a closed apolitical
circle—members were from industry or did not have to follow
political directives—which created a secure and stable space
for them to embark on collective sensemaking:
In an early stage, you cannot discuss something with a
mass of people … In the early stage, it is important to
do this in a closed circle of good people …, innovative
people, and then work it out to the extent that it
constitutes a good solution among those people.
(Respondent 15)
This closed-circle setup does not mean that the representatives
did not consider information from outside the circle but that
they had the opportunity to work with a certain stability over
a considerable period to form a shared mental model. This
process resulted in a first proposal for a law for regulating a
cryptofinance system based on blockchain technology.
Phase 2 (extended-circle sensemaking): Phase 2 commenced
when additional experts with legal backgrounds and from
academia were brought in to join the core working group,

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
189
widening the group’s expertise. Considering multiple
perspectives throughout the process was a key element: “This
worked because key stakeholders from industry were involved
in the working group. I think that the ratio between lawyers and
non-lawyers was balanced” (Respondent 12).
People from outside this temporary organization were also
involved, such as the CEO of a Bitcoin company, who was not
part of the working group but provided feedback and inputs early
in the process: “Because we were always involved, we were able
to give our feedback and inputs early” (Respondent 16).
The result of Phase 2 was conceptual development around
regulating a trustworthy technology-based token economy
and, eventually, a report on a law on trustworthy technology
based on transaction systems to present to stakeholders for
consultation.
Phase 3 (regulatory implementation): Phase 3 began with a
press conference to announce the official start of the
consultation process. The law was then presented to
stakeholders to get their feedback, and the sensemaking
process was carried outside the working group to involve
more stakeholders:
The consultation is a formal process, so the
government generates a report …. Then one has a
defined number of weeks—in our case ten weeks, from
mid-August to mid-November. Everyone had the
opportunity to submit written comments. Throughout
this phase, we communicated a lot, as we knew that the
law was not easy to understand, and we considered all
the inputs that were received formally or informally.
We considered many highly substantial responses.
(Respondent 15)
The government started the political process and communicated
the newly drafted law, the final version of the law after its
passage, and a related ordinance to political parties, various
stakeholders, and the general population from August 2018 to
December 2019. After the two legally prescribed parliamentary
readings in June and October 2019 and a detailed debate, the law
was passed unanimously and came into force on January 1,
2020. An official press release highlighted how the law
addressed both civil laws and the supervision of service
providers, using the broad notion of the token economy. As the
press release stated: “With the new law, Liechtenstein is the first
country with a comprehensive regulation for the token economy.
The law regulates civil law and also provides appropriate
supervision of service providers in the token economy.”
Thus, the process moved from a loose understanding of the
need for regulation and a narrow understanding of the
technology and its use, to the formation of a working group,
to the extension of that working group, to an abstract and
general conceptualization of technology and its uses that could
eventually win public and parliamentary support.
Our analysis indicates that the sensemaking process involved
a number of iterative reconceptualizations involving
abstraction and elaboration that produced
reconceptualizations that were iteratively articulated in
various artifacts, including PowerPoint presentations,
visualizations, concept papers, and the text of the law. These
reconceptualizations involved an increasingly abstract,
general, and effectively technology-neutral regulatory
understanding that focused on the technology’s uses in terms
of secure storage and transfer of tokens and services around
tokens; considered essential requirements for the technology
in terms of ensuring the integrity, assignment, and disposal of
tokens; and defined roles around the handling of tokens that
would allow the technology to be regulated and provide an
enforcement layer (e.g., through the role of a physical
validator). Tokens were what Respondent 15 called the
“crystallization point of the entire regulatory effort.”
Ultimately, the initial understanding of token as representing
cryptocurrencies or other financial assets was replaced by the
understanding that tokens were containers of rights, which
also allowed functionality to be added to tokens.
Interrelated Abstractions and Elaborations
Producing Conceptual Shifts
The idea of regulating cryptocurrencies and blockchain was
promoted by actors who were functioning in the emerging crypto
ecosystem, including Respondents 2, 11, and 13, the last of
whom, for instance, had technical expertise in cryptocurrencies
and blockchain technology. These actors represented the
economic interest in regulating cryptocurrencies and blockchain,
the focus on innovation using the new technology, and the
requirement of legal certainty. In August 2016, goals expressed
in a written regulatory concept for blockchain and
cryptocurrencies based on discussions among the core working
group members included the development of a concept for
regulating the “blockchain industry” and a concept for “real value
secured cryptocurrencies.” Key notions used included
“cryptocurrency,” “virtual currency,” and “blockchain.” At this
point, identified roles and their responsibilities that would be
subject to such regulation included custodians (of tokens), wallet
providers (software providers), trading platforms (that allow third
parties to buy and sell), and exchange platforms (that act as
interfaces between currency systems). These vaguely defined
roles were specifically associated with cryptocurrencies and
blockchain but already foreshadowed the first major conceptual
development: towards regulating cryptofinance systems.

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
190
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
Figure 1. Conceptual Shifts and Underlying Reconceptualizations Based on Abstraction and Elaboration
Two key conceptual shifts—significant developments in the
overall conceptual understanding of the regulatory effort
along technology, use, and associated roles—departed from
this initial understanding. The first shift was from the goal of
regulating “blockchain for cryptocurrency” to regulating
“blockchain for cryptofinance systems” and the second from
the goal of regulating “blockchain for cryptofinance systems”
to regulating “trustworthy technology for transaction systems
and the token economy.” We identified the more detailed
reconceptualizations that occurred in terms of abstractions and
elaborations for each of these two major conceptual shifts.
Figure 1 provides an overview that highlights how the process
was triggered by regulatory demand and stakeholder interests,
how it comprised two overall conceptual shifts, and how these
conceptual shifts are constituted by reconceptualizations
regarding the technology (level of technology), potential uses
(level of use), and associated roles (level of roles). These
reconceptualizations reflect the outcomes of the interrelated
processes of abstraction and elaboration collectively carried
out by the involved actors.
6
Note that the timing of the shifts occurs in relation to but does not fully
overlap with the three formal stages we identified.
Conceptual Shift 1: Blockchain for Cryptocurrency
→
Blockchain for Cryptofinance System
6
Early in Phase 1 (closed-circle sensemaking), the focus was
extended from the goal of regulating “cryptocurrency” like
Bitcoin—which was a response to the triggers in terms of
regulatory demand and stakeholder interests—to the more
encompassing goal of regulating “cryptofinance.” This
elevated the regulatory effort to the systems level and required
a conceptual description of the elements of cryptofinance
systems. Respondent 15 suggested the idea of regulating
cryptofinance systems.
This first major conceptual shift involved actors that
represented a regulatory agency (Respondent 1), government
(Respondent 15), crypto ecosystem and technical expertise
(Respondent 17), and legal expertise (Respondent 3).
Representation of these perspectives allowed the team to be
receptive to developments in the external environment, as
reflected in the emerging and equivocal nature of the
technology, and provided impetus for the sensemaking
Regulating
cryptocurrency and
blockchain
Distributed
ledger
technology (DLT)
Trustworthy
technology (TT)
Blockchain
Token as
representation of
asset
Token as
container for
rights
Token as
rights
TT systems roles
DLT trade and
service systems
roles
Cryptofinance
systems roles
Level of
use
Level of
roles
Blockchain
Token as
representation of
asset
Cryptocurrency
roles
Cryptofinance
systems TT systems
DLT trade- and
service systems
Cryptocurrency
Law … on tokens and
TT service providers
Law on cryptofinance
systems
Law on DLT trade and
service systems
Level of
technology
Conceptual shift 1:
From regulating
cryptocurrency to
cryptofinance systems
Conceptual shift 2:
From regulating
cryptofinance systems to
regulating the token economy
Initial triggers
Regulatory demand
Stakeholder interests

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
191
process. For instance, the regulatory agency confronted issues
related to developments in the markets, such as an increasing
number of initial coin offerings (ICOs) and discussions around
the issuance of securities. These issues indicated that the focus
on regulating currency was too narrow:
We started when the community was concerned with
Bitcoin and Ethereum and the application of smart
contracts, DAOs [decentralized autonomous
organizations], etc. But then the ICO wave came, and
we noticed that there were suddenly questions like
“What is such a token?” and “Is it a security?” so the
connection to the finance system became stronger.
Before that, it was simply a cryptocurrency, but then it
became more. (Respondent 1)
At this stage, it was also important that a member who
represented the government (Respondent 15) take the lead as
an organizer and facilitator of the core working group that
provided the sensemaking space in which the first concept was
developed. The first conceptual shift involved mainly
elaborations, as elements were added that provided a point of
departure for further development of the law. However, it was
already clear that regulating the emerging technology would
require abstractions, mostly in relation to the roles that would
have to be regulated. Table 6 provides an overview of the key
reconceptualizations underlying the first shift and highlights
how these reconceptualizations were produced by the
interrelated processes of abstraction and elaboration.
Regarding the use of technology, the idea of regulating
cryptofinance systems is more encompassing than the idea of
regulating cryptocurrencies. The new notion of a
“cryptofinance system,” which was particularly promoted and
developed by the government representative in the working
group, who also wrote the first concept for regulating
cryptofinance systems, can be traced back to December 2016.
At this point, a cryptofinance system was seen as involving
key objects, including identities (individuals and legal
entities), digital assets (e.g., money, stocks, derivatives, raw
materials, real estate), contracts, and structures (e.g., funds,
trusts). A concept paper from January 2017 noted: “A
cryptofinance system is based on the idea that digital assets
are available for trade. Therefore, the transformation of
physical assets to a digital representation is a central function.”
This reconceptualization resulted from an elaboration of the
required roles, which were further specified (e.g., the
custodian must ensure that deposited assets are accessible at
any time). A need for abstract role descriptions was
documented in April 2017, early in the process, indicating the
goal of abstraction. The government representative
highlighted how finding abstract roles was a central element
of the sensemaking process:
Finding these roles was elementary … and involved
the effort not only to detach roles from the technology
but also from business models. That was a general
move throughout the process … from the specific use
case to the abstract. (Respondent 15)
Associated with this reconceptualization of the overall regulatory
target was the insight that the goal was not only to establish a
regulatory framework but also to do so in the form of a law. The
intermediate result of the collective prospective sensemaking
process can be seen in a label in a strategy document that was
used to describe the intended outcome of the regulatory effort,
which reflected the shared meaning in April 2017: the idea of a
“law providing guidelines (Rahmengesetz) on cryptofinance
systems.” What later became the key element (the “essence”) of
the regulatory effort—tokens—was already present, and notions
like “asset token” were used. However, at this point, “token” had
no legal definition, and it was used in relation to the idea of a
cryptofinance system in which tokens represented
cryptocurrencies or other assets. That the goal was a technology-
neutral regulation was already visible, but the focus was still on
blockchain and so was specific to that technology.
Conceptual Shift 2: Regulating Cryptofinance
Systems
→
Regulating the Token Economy
The second conceptual shift, which occurred in Phase 2
(extended-circle sensemaking), went from regulating
cryptofinance systems to regulating the token economy.
Awareness was increasing that blockchain and related
technologies were facilitating the emergence of new
business models, and from the perspective of regulation, the
challenge was much more than regulating issues related to
ICOs. One respondent highlighted this development:
“Suddenly it was a Cambrian explosion, where many new
lifeforms were created, and that needed to be accounted for”
(Respondent 1).
Consequently, the sensemaking process moved away from
its focus on financial applications, and the discussion came
to be heavily influenced by actors who foregrounded the
emerging nature of the technology from an industry
(Respondent 17) as well as the legal perspective
(Respondent 2), as they saw broad applicability to the
economy and business models:
I see implications for the supply chains of all sectors—
industry, logistics, administration. I see potential
implications everywhere, particularly where the goal
is to collaborate across companies and parties, and
where digital goods … are transferred, exchanged,
enriched, and transported. (Respondent 17)

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
192
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
Table 6. Key Reconceptualizations Based on Abstraction and Elaboration Underlying Shift 1
Reconceptualization
Level
Description
Cryptocurrency
Cryptofinance
systems
Use
Through elaboration, the understanding of the use aspect of the regulatory target
was reconceptualized from cryptocurrency to cryptofinance systems. The
reconceptualization was based on elaboration because it involved the definition of
elements that required consideration: identities, digital assets, and service
providers.
Cryptocurrency roles
Cryptofinance
systems roles
Roles
Through elaboration, the initial understanding of roles expressed in terms of
cryptocurrency roles was reconceptualized to cryptofinance system roles. Roles
were added and defined.
There is also evidence of abstraction as part of this reconceptualization since the
goal was to describe roles in abstract terms. Abstract role descriptions were
considered a foundation for the regulation because they would enable the
regulation of service providers rather than a specific technology.
The process was again facilitated by the government’s
representative (Respondent 15), who also facilitated
communication with the government. Other actors were
involved to help elaborate on the emerging text of the law—
including academics who had a legal focus (Respondent 5
and Respondent 9)—and to reflect on the process and
support the more specific formulation of the consultation
report: “From March and April on, the focus was on
specifying the consultation report further, especially the part
concerning the regulatory law” (Respondent 5).
The second major conceptual shift involved abstraction and
elaboration related to the technology, its uses, and its
associated roles, which provided the groundwork for the
concept of “token” as the essence of the regulatory effort in
that the technology ensures the integrity of tokens, uses
revolve around the secure transfer and storage of tokens, and
roles provide services around tokens. The first set of
interrelated reconceptualizations based on the interrelated
processes of abstraction and elaboration underlying this shift
occurred in February and March 2018 (Table 7).
Regarding the technology, we observed how actors abstracted
from the focus on blockchain to the more general concept of
distributed ledger technology (DLT), of which blockchain is
just one potential implementation. DLTs are technologies that
allow for the decentralization of data across data stores
(“ledgers”) and require some consensus mechanism to
validate transactions. However, DLTs are less technology-
specific than blockchain, which is a type of DLT that uses a
particular type of data structure, where data is stored and
transmitted in “blocks” that are connected to each other in a
“chain” (Natarajan et al., 2017). The reconceptualization was
mainly based on abstraction because blockchain is a type of
DLT, so it shares all of its properties with DLT, whereas DLT
shares with blockchain only some of its essential properties,
such as decentralization and consensus-based validation. A
document from February 2018 states that cryptofinance
systems are based on DLT (e.g., blockchain). While the notion
of a cryptofinance system was still used in this document, the
use focus was soon also abstracted from “cryptofinance” to
“trade and services.” The notion of “trade and service
systems” is more abstract and general than “cryptofinance,”
as the former addresses a broader variety of uses, as reflected
in the focus on secure exchange (trade) and storage of tokens
and associated services as a “system for the secure exchange
(trade) and the secure storage of tokens and services based
thereon.” This involved a general token, whereas
cryptocurrencies, for instance, are a specific type of token.
The understanding of token as being central to the regulatory
effort had evolved. Accordingly, a February 2018 draft of
the law text provided a legal definition of token, although
this definition still considered elements of the technology
and was not yet formulated in a technology-neutral way. It
defined token as: “Information, consisting of a sequence of
connected signs or bits. This sequence represents, through
the use of a decentralized ledger, tradeable rights.”
The understanding of roles evolved with the understanding
of the technology and its uses, including the definition of a
token. Roles were now defined in terms of DLT trade and
service system roles and reflected a reconceptualization of
the understanding of roles from financial roles to more
general trade and service roles, which involved the
formulation of roles for enforcement, including the role of a
physical validator. Cryptocurrency-specific notions like
“crypto safe provider” were dropped in favor of less specific,
more abstract, and more generally applicable roles.

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
193
Table 7. Key Reconceptualizations Based on Abstraction and Elaboration Underlying the First Part of
Shift 2
Reconceptualization
Level
Description
Blockchain
DLT
Technology
The reconceptualization from the conceptual understanding of the
technology target from blockchain to DLT was primarily based on
abstraction, as it involved identifying essential properties of the technology
(e.g., decentralization, consensus-based validation). Blockchain, a type of
DLT, shares all of its properties with DLT, whereas DLT shares only some
essential properties (e.g., decentralization and consensus-based validation)
with blockchain.
Cryptofinance systems
DLT trade and service
systems
Use
Through abstraction, the essential properties of the potential uses (trade
and services related to tokens) were identified. Cryptofinance systems are a
type of trade and service system but have specific currency-related
properties, so they are closely related to DLT systems.
Token as representation of
asset
Token as a right
Use
The reconceptualization from token as a (financial) asset to token as a right
was based on elaboration as conceptual clarity was added through both
definition and examples.
However, we can also conceive of a “right” as being more abstract than an
“asset”; thus, this reconceptualization also required abstraction.
Cryptofinance
systems roles
DLT trade and service
systems roles
Roles
Changing the focus from cryptofinance system roles to DLT trade and
service system roles was based on abstraction, as cryptocurrency-specific
notions (e.g., “crypto safe provider”) were dropped, but also involved
elaboration, as roles like the physical validator, which guarantees the
enforcement of the rights represented by a token, were further defined.
The prime minister mentioned this more abstract and general
understanding developed by the working group in a speech at
the Finance Forum Liechtenstein conference in March 2018,
still using the term “blockchain,” which was a well-known
term at the time: “Blockchain technology is interesting not
only for cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin but also for other
applications. In the future, next to cryptocurrencies, many
other assets, such as real estate, cars, music titles, and bonds,
will be traded on blockchain technology.” The intermediate
result of the collective prospective sensemaking process can
be seen in the new title of the draft law text, “Law on DLT
Trade and Service Systems,” which reflected the shared
meaning in February 2018.
Conceptual Shift 2, Continued: The Breakthrough
in Terms of Trustworthy Technology and Token
Container
DLT still pointed at aspects of implementation, although
they were more abstract than “blockchain,” so this
conceptualization was not technology-neutral, as was also
reflected in the understanding of token, which was still
defined in terms of the underlying technology. The
conceptual shift toward regulating the token economy
involved additional abstractions that allowed the working
group to move toward a more technologically neutral
understanding and also involved additional elaborations.
Table 8 provides an overview.
Regarding the technology, “trustworthy technology” (TT)
replaced the concept of DLT, thereby omitting
implementation details (abstraction) and providing a more
encompassing understanding of the technology to be
regulated, as DLTs were considered one form of trustworthy
technology. We traced the documents’ use of trustworthy
technology to April 2018. The notion of “trustworthiness”
describes a property of the technology that has the ability to
create trust but does not relate to any specific type of
implementation. The underlying rationale was that the
technology would enable services that consumers can trust.
As one respondent said: “This is about a story of trust—the
consumer story in its broadest sense” (Respondent 1). Such
an implementation-neutral formulation did not mean that
technology does not matter, but the opposite:
And then I believe it will matter what these
technologies are. We speak of “trustworthy
technologies,” but are they really, or will there be
hacks and attacks … that could destroy that trust?
How good are those technologies, really?
(Respondent 1).

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
194
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
Table 8. Key Reconceptualizations Based on Abstraction and Elaboration Underlying the Second Part of
Shift 2
Reconceptualization
Level
Description
DLT
Trustworthy technology
Technology
A reconceptualization from DLT, a type of trustworthy technology (TT), to TT
was accomplished through abstraction. The essential property of the
technology was seen in its abstract ability to create trust.
However, the reconceptualization was also based on elaboration. The
conceptual understanding of TT was changed from a technology that
mathematically guarantees integrity of data and transactions to a technology
that ensures integrity, clear assignment, and disposal of tokens.
DLT trade and
service systems
Trustworthy technology
systems
Use
Through abstraction, the understanding of the technology’s use was
reconceptualized from trade and service systems to TT systems. The
essential use property was transactions around tokens. The
reconceptualization went from DTL trade and service systems via TT trade
and service systems (considering the abstraction in the technology) to TT
transaction systems (transaction systems based on TT).
Token as a right
Token as a container of
rights (“token container
model”)
Use
Through elaboration, the conceptual idea that tokens can represent any right
or obligation or any collection of rights or obligations as well as associated
functionalities, was developed further.
DLT trade and service
systems roles
Trustworthy technology
systems roles
Roles
Through abstraction, roles were reconceptualized from DLT trade and
service system roles to TT system roles, thus removing the specific
requirement of being related to DLT.
However, since this reconceptualization also implied the need for further
changes to the role descriptions, it also involved elaboration.
A document from April 2018 defined trustworthy technologies
as “technologies that mathematically guarantee the integrity of
data and transactions” and that “include a high level of trust-
building elements.” While no longer limited to “blockchain” or
“distributed ledger,” this definition of technology involves
some details about implementation, as it prescribes that
technology must “mathematically guarantee the integrity of
data and transactions.” However, this detail was abandoned
later, thus completing the reconceptualization towards an
abstract understanding of the technology, and the final law
makes no mention of any “mathematical” guarantee but just that
the technology must ensure the integrity of tokens. One
respondent highlighted how this reconceptualization of
trustworthy technology was a deliberate abstraction:
Trustworthy technology is the legal formulation, the
wording, that we found in the end after seeking how one
could describe the paradigm shift in such way that it did
not have a specific reference. The move was from crypto
to trustworthy technology, that is, an abstraction from
the concrete technology for encryption to an abstract
system that was entirely independent of cryptography.
(Respondent 15)
In the context of moving to trustworthy technology, the use focus
was changed to “transaction systems” and the understanding of
tokens was elaborated further. We traced this reconceptualization
to June 2018, when a discussion addressed whether the law
should be about “trade and service systems based on trustworthy
technologies,” “service providers based on trade and service
systems based on trustworthy technologies,” or “regulation of
transaction systems based on trustworthy technologies.” That
“transaction systems” are an abstract conceptualization of the
technology is mentioned in the explanations that precede a
version of the law text from June 2018:
Because of the high pace of innovation around
blockchain technology and its applications, it is
important, to formulate a law that is sufficiently abstract
to be applicable across technology generations.
Therefore, in this law, the notion of “transaction systems
based on trustworthy technologies (TT systems)” is used.
The sensemaking around use kept the concept of token at its
center. The participants still looked for an understanding of
token that would capture what was now the broad application
scope of the token economy:

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
195
The complete opening for everything, this container of
rights, happened then. We discussed what felt like 100
or 200 variants for how one could formulate this—first
narrower and then wider—and toward the end it
reached the quintessence, so we could cover all sorts of
applications. (Respondent 15)
The result of this process was a formulation of token that fully
abstracted away from the technology that would handle those
tokens; this was the breakthrough when the “essence” of the
regulatory effort was detached from specific technological
developments. The regulation was not about a specific technology
but about tokens handled by trustworthy technologies, which were
defined in May 2018 as follows: “An entry on the TT System that
can embody justifiable claim or membership rights towards a
person, rights to things or other absolute or relative rights and
ensures assignment to one or more public keys.” One of the
respondents commented on the importance of tokens as the focus
of the regulatory effort to develop
a law that now regulates tokens—because that is the
central element—that allows market participants and
investors who trade with tokens to get on board much
more simply. So, I assume that this was one of the
factors: that the application of the law is only then
correctly delineated if tokens as central assignment
units are regulated, and the focus is not so much on the
network structure. (Respondent 5).
The idea that eventually reflected the collective meaning that
had been created and that helped convey the target of regulating
service providers and their services based on trustworthy
technologies using tokens, was that of a token container. This
concept was the endpoint of the sensemaking process; it helped
carry the idea outside the working group, explain it to a broader
audience, and prepare the ground for discussing the concept in
parliamentary debate. The notion of a token container did not
find its way into the text of the final law but was a
communication device used to capture the essence of the
regulatory effort. The concept was thought to capture the idea
that tokens could represent any right that could be “kept in” a
token, which also requires the implementation of certain
functionality associated with the connection between the token
and the rights. Figure 2 shows the original visualization of the
token container model.
This second conceptual shift led to the shared understanding
that the regulatory effort in making a law focuses on the roles
and associated services enabled by the abstract and general idea
of trustworthy technology. At that point, the title of the law was
“Law on Service Providers Based on Transaction Systems
Based on Trustworthy Technology.” The final title of the law,
“Law of 3 October 2019 on Tokens and TT Service Providers,”
retains this technology element but also articulates that the
regulatory target is trustworthy technology service providers
(focus on roles) and the tokens they handle rather than the
technology itself, which provides the foundation but is defined
in an implementation-neutral way. Figure 3 shows Article 1
from the law, which indicates key elements in terms of use
(transaction systems for tokens), the enabling technology
(trustworthy technology as an implementation-neutral concept),
the required roles (trustworthy technology service providers),
and overall regulatory goals in terms of ensuring trust and being
innovation friendly.
Discussion
Triggered by regulatory demand and stakeholder interests,
sensemaking about an emerging and, therefore, necessarily
equivocal technology to construct an innovation-friendly
and technology-neutral regulation that creates legal certainty
and protects users is based on the interrelated processes of
abstraction and elaboration through which actors
reconceptualize the regulatory target in terms of the
technology, its uses, and its associated roles. This
sensemaking must meet—or, rather, balance—two goals:
First, it must find a conceptualization that can accommodate
a variety of technology implementations, emerging uses, and
role instantiations by omitting and extracting essential
properties—it must abstract away from concrete
technologies (Koops, 2006). More abstract formulations
apply to a larger space of potential future instantiations and
allow for generalization. This goal is met by means of
abstraction through which actors extract and generalize
essential properties to reconceptualize their understanding
iteratively on the way to formulating an innovation-friendly
regulatory framework. Reconceptualizing the regulatory
target through abstraction transforms specific
understandings of the technology, its uses, and its associated
roles into more abstract understandings. Abstraction is the
process of mapping one representation onto another by
removing some features (Giunchiglia & Walsh, 1992), and
allows one to focus attention on certain properties and to
generalize in such way that identifies a target’s “common
core or essence” (Kramer, 2007, p. 38). Abstraction involves
withdrawing and removing details, leaving out properties,
and formulating more general concepts by extracting
common features and properties from instances (Kramer,
2007). The process could also move toward a less abstract
conceptual understanding (de-abstraction, moving from
some abstract understanding of trustworthy technology to
the idea that it would be desirable to regulate a technology
with specific features). However, we did not observe such
de-abstraction in the sense of narrowing the focus on more
specific technologies in our analysis.

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
196
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
Note: Image provided by originator; for a description of the Token Container Model see also Nägele, T. (2022). The Legal Nature of
Tokens under Liechtenstein's TVTG with special consideration of the Token Container Model {T}. DLT Media.
Figure 2. Original Visualization of the Token Container Model (September 2018)
Art. 1
Object and Purpose
1) This law establishes the legal framework for all transaction systems based on Trustworthy Technology and in particular governs:
a) The basis in terms of civil law with regard to Tokens and the representation of rights through Tokens and their transfer;
b) The supervision and rights and obligations of TT Service Providers.
2) It aims:
a) to ensure trust in digital legal communication, in particular in the financial and economic sector and the protection of users in TT Systems;
b) to create excellent, innovation-friendly and technology-neutral framework conditions for rendering services concerning TT Systems.
Note: The original version of the law is in German and this translation was provided for information purposes only
(https://www.regierung.li/files/medienarchiv/950-6-01-09-2021-en.pdf)
Figure 3. Article 1 of the Law of 3 October 2019 on Tokens and TT Service Providers (Token and TT Service
Provider Act; TVTG)
Second, sensemaking to regulate emerging technologies must
identify and specify details and requirements that support the
regulatory goals of creating legal certainty and protecting
users (Koops, 2006). While the understanding of what is
essential about the technology, its uses, and its associated roles
is accomplished through abstraction, actors must work
through these elements to make them amenable to regulation.
This goal is met by means of elaboration, through which
actors identify and formulate details and requirements to
reconceptualize their understanding iteratively on the way to
formulating a coherent regulatory framework that also allows
for control and enforcement. Elaboration involves the
incremental reformulation of elements of the regulatory effort,
and elaborations of one element can require elaborations of
other elements. Elaboration allows actors to refine their
interpretations and integrate them into more complex shared
mental models (Stigliani & Ravasi, 2012). By adding details
and requirements and formulating a coherent conceptual
understanding, elaboration supports the regulatory goals of
creating legal certainty and protecting users.

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
197
Figure 4. Process Model of Technology Regulation Through Prospective Sensemaking Based on
Abstraction and Elaboration
Figure 4 visualizes this theorizing by highlighting how
regulatory demand and stakeholder interests trigger a
process of collective prospective sensemaking, in which the
technology is reconceptualized using the interrelated
processes of abstraction and elaboration. Through these
processes, actors can move toward implementation
neutrality, accommodation of emerging uses, and abstract
roles. At the same time, abstraction and elaboration allow
actors to reconcile their various viewpoints and consider
incoming signals from the environment (e.g., in terms of
technological developments and new uses) by increasing the
level of abstraction while simultaneously specifying details
and requirements relative to those levels of abstraction (e.g.,
in terms of the definition of roles).
At the level of technology, participants can use abstraction to
construct conceptualizations that can accommodate future
technological developments and implementations (Reed,
2007). Abstraction allows shared understanding to move from
technology specificity to implementation neutrality.
Implementation neutrality is one way to conceive of
technology neutrality that highlights that multiple
implementations of a technology are possible (Reed, 2007).
Other ways to conceive of technology neutrality include
technology indifference, which refers to an exclusive focus on
ends and regulation that is independent of the technology, and
potential neutrality, which refers to a focus on means such
that, if at some point the regulation discriminates against some
technologies, noncompliant technologies can be modified
because the regulation does not impose specific technical
standards (Reed, 2007). In the case we studied, the
technology’s essential property, identified through
abstraction, was its ability to create trust (its trustworthiness).
This property required a move from a focus on means
(blockchain) to a focus on ends (trust). Many possible
implementations of trustworthy technology—that is,
implementations that have the essential property of being
trustworthy as defined by the law—are possible. We use the
notion of implementation neutrality to highlight that a law can
allow for multiple implementations but is not completely
indifferent to technology if the law articulates certain
requirements (Reed, 2007). Unless a law is completely
indifferent to technology, elaborations are needed around the
abstract understanding of the technology to define its key
properties. In our case study, elaboration helped add details
and requirements in relation to the abstract property of
trustworthiness, such as ensuring the integrity of tokens, their
clear assignment to identifiers, and the disposal of tokens.
These properties were further elaborated in an accompanying
report that provided input for the parliamentary process and
mentioned, for instance, specific potential implementations,
such as through cryptography and decentralization.
At the level of use, abstraction can lead to conceptualizations
that can accommodate future uses. Abstraction allows actors
to move their shared understanding from specific uses that are
known at the time of the law-making process to emerging
uses, which can provide the legal basis for emerging business
processes, business models, and services. In the case we
studied, an abstract characterization of potential uses was
Specific use
(cryptofinance)
Emerging use
(secure transfer and storage of
tokens, services based on this)
Technology specificity
(blockchain, DLT)
Abstract roles
(trustworthy technology roles)
Specific roles
(cryptofinance roles)
Abstraction &
elaboration
Level of
use
Level of
technology
Level of
roles
Collective prospective sensemaking
Abstraction &
elaboration
Abstraction &
elaboration
Incoming signals (awareness of technological developments, new uses, new required roles)
Triggers
Regulatory
demand and
stakeholder
interests
regarding
emerging
technology
Implementation
neutrality
(trustworthy technology)

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
198
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
conducted in terms of securely transferring and storing tokens
as well as rendering services based on this. Elaboration was
necessary to define the key characteristics of and requirements
associated with those abstract uses. For instance, throughout
the process, different “use cases” were discussed to elaborate
how various roles would interact to allow for certain uses
(such as uses around trading assets); this discussion helped in
formulating the required roles.
At the level of roles, abstraction can move roles from specific
roles to abstract roles, which is helpful for identifying what is
essential about the roles to be regulated so they can be applied
to a variety of situations. At the same time, elaboration is
needed to define the relevant responsibilities and obligations
and to make roles amenable to regulation and regulatory
enforcement. In our case, we observed abstraction from roles
that were specific to cryptofinance applications to roles like
“token issuer” that were related to storing and transferring
tokens securely and offering services around them. The key
idea behind this abstraction was to ensure that all of these roles
would handle tokens. This abstraction co-occurred with the
formulation of role responsibilities and obligations, which
involved, for instance, specifying the qualification of tokens
and their disposal as well as the supervision of service
providers in terms of registration requirements, reliability,
technical suitability, minimal capital, and so forth. Thus, the
regulation is more specific in terms of uses and roles than it is
regarding the technology itself.
Implications for Research
Regulating Emerging Technology
We contribute to the literature on regulating emerging
technologies (e.g., Brownsword et al., 2017; Butler et al.,
2023; Kokshagina et al., 2023; Mandel, 2009; Székely et al.,
2011)—or, more broadly, the literature on regulation in the
context of sociotechnical change (Bennett Moses, 2017)—by
focusing on the process of making sense of emerging
technologies in order to regulate them, i.e., by focusing on the
procedural instead of the substantive aspect of constructing
regulatory institutions. Our focus is on the regulation of
technology (e.g., Kokshagina et al., 2023) rather than through
technology (e.g., De Vaujany et al., 2018; also see Butler et
al., 2023). We highlight how actors abstract to extract and
generalize essential properties in support of the regulatory
goals of technology neutrality and innovation-friendliness and
elaborate to identify and specify the details and requirements
supporting the regulatory goals of creating legal certainty and
protecting users. We thus explain how collectives of actors
involved in technology regulation balance potential trade-offs
between abstracting away from specific implementations
while also providing clarity and precision (Koops, 2006). We
contribute to clarifying several aspects of the process of
regulating emerging technologies, which we elaborate on in
what follows.
New technologies and their associated capabilities raise
regulatory questions (Bennett Moses, 2017) and create
regulatory gaps (Mandel, 2009) that lead to ambiguity, thus
triggering regulatory processes and institutional change. Such
was the case with Bitcoin and Ethereum, which raised
questions about blockchain regulation (Finck, 2018; Kiviat,
2015) and have recently been featured in debates and political
processes around regulating generative AI (Hacker et al.,
2023). One important issue triggering these processes is the
ambiguity that stakeholders experience in relation to the
materiality (e.g., unclear understanding of the materiality of
blockchain) and uses (e.g., discussion around what blockchain
allows for) of a novel technology, as well as its associated
consequences and risks. The ensuing sensemaking process
may involve an influx of signals as the regulatory process
progresses and actors co-create meaning as the technological
development proceeds. While regulators make sense of the
technology, other actors in the environment also make sense
of the technology and develop new processes, products, and
business models, which must be reflected in the regulatory
process. Our model of the interrelated processes of abstraction
and elaboration explains how, beginning with initial triggering
signals, actors conceptualize (they need to start somewhere)
and then reconceptualize technology to construct shared
meaning, and how this process involves accommodating an
influx of signals as technological development progresses. To
further increase our understanding of how regulatory
processes evolve, future research could study when those
reconceptualizations occur, what causes them to occur, and
why the result is formalized in a new regulatory institution,
such as a written regulation or, as in our case, a law.
One key element of the sensemaking process as it moves from
a triggering event to passing a regulation is the level of
specificity versus neutrality of the regulated technology or
class of technologies. Technology neutrality has been
criticized because of its imprecision (Bennett Moses, 2017;
Koops, 2006; Reed, 2007) and because it does not pay
sufficient attention to the sociotechnical context of technology
deployment (Bennett Moses, 2017). For instance, Bennett
Moses (2017) argued that technology specificity may not be
best suited to achieving some regulatory goals but that the
technology itself and its particular procedures and properties
should, in some cases, be the regulatory target. The point is
that the underlying technology does matter. Therefore, the
role of technology and the extent to which it needs to be
specified is necessarily subject to the sensemaking process.
Our study supports the notion that technology specificity and
technology neutrality can be conceived of as a continuum
rather than a dichotomy and that regulating emerging

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
199
technologies thus need not entail a choice between dual poles
of specificity and neutrality (Greenberg, 2015). Actors move
along the continuum through collective sensemaking,
reconceptualizing the regulatory target through abstraction
and elaboration. This process reflects that most regulations
involve both technology-specific and technology-neutral
elements (Bennett Moses, 2017; Greenberg, 2015). To further
improve the understanding of how technology-specific and
technology-neutral elements are combined in technology
regulation, future research could study the circumstances
under which actors decide to add technology-specific
elements or technology-neutral elements.
The movement from specificity to neutrality does not involve
changes in the understanding of the technology’s material
aspects alone. Our theorizing views questions about
implementation specificity versus neutrality as being directly
related to the dimensions of specific use versus emergent use
and specific roles versus abstract roles; thus, it views the
regulation of emerging technologies as an inherently
sociotechnical problem. This view is consistent with the
perspective that the challenge is related more to adjusting laws
and regulations for sociotechnical change than regulating
technologies (Bennett Moses, 2017). Regulation must
consider the evolution of the sociotechnical context through
the stream of new capabilities enabled by the new technology
(Bennett Moses, 2017). Our work contributes to this debate by
providing a nuanced perspective on how technology is
conceptualized throughout the regulatory development
process. This nuanced view characterizes technology
neutrality from a sociotechnical perspective that departs from
a primarily artifact-centric understanding of technology
neutrality and moves toward one that puts what it is that
matters about the technology in the foreground (Leonardi,
2012). We highlight that the conceptualization of the
technology, its uses, and its associated roles all involve some
conceptual understanding of the technology: The technology
dimension captures the technology’s material aspects; the use
dimension, rooted in some material understanding, captures
what it is that can be done with the technology; and the role
dimension captures how actors are involved in those uses or
appropriations through the actors’ institutional roles. Any
change in the understanding of the technology’s level of
abstraction involves a reconceptualization not only of the
technology itself but also of its emerging uses and associated
roles. To further develop our understanding of technology
regulation as a sociotechnical problem, future research could
study the more specific mechanisms that link change in one
sociotechnical dimension to the other dimensions in terms of
regulatory efforts.
Finally, the relational perspective allows us to explain how
shifts from an initial focus on a specific technology to a focus
on its uses and the regulation of its associated roles can
occur, as the regulation of emerging technologies typically
focuses on behaviors and outcomes (Greenberg, 2015;
Koops, 2006; Reed, 2007), while regulatory design should
focus on consequences (Wiener, 2004). Choosing a certain
level of abstraction and then elaborating on the essential
properties at that level facilitates thinking about uses and
roles in terms of responsibilities and obligations, thus
defining policy goals in terms of behaviors and outcomes. In
our study, we observed an increasing elaboration of roles,
which then constituted the core of the lawmaking effort and
reflected the notion that those who seek to regulate emerging
technologies must understand them as being embedded in a
complex and changing sociotechnical context (Bennett
Moses, 2017). To further improve our understanding of a
moving regulatory focus, future research could address how
specific moves from more technology-centric to more
outcome-oriented conceptualizations occur—and, perhaps,
vice versa.
This perspective can be applied to other technology
regulation efforts. For instance, the EU regulatory
framework proposal on AI defines AI technologies not in
terms of their functionality or material features but in terms
of the risks associated with what can be done with those
technologies. The goal involves “to promote the uptake of
AI and address the risks associated with certain uses of this
new technology” (Madiega, 2023, p. 2). For instance, AI
technologies that can be used to exploit vulnerable groups
are perceived as posing an unacceptable risk, whereas AI
technologies that can be used in education and vocational
training are perceived as posing “only” a high risk (Madiega,
2023). One could use our framework to analyze how this
process has considered increasingly abstract or increasingly
specific understandings of technology over time, as the
theory of regulating emerging technologies through the
interrelated processes of abstraction and elaboration that we
present in this paper suggests that moving in both
directions—specificity and abstraction—may be possible.
Making Sense of Emerging Technology
Emerging technologies like blockchain are associated with
uncertainty and ambiguity (Rotolo et al., 2015) and involve
new ways of using those technologies (Reed, 2007; Rotolo
et al., 2015; Yoo et al., 2012), new business models, and new
modes of value creation (von Briel et al., 2018). They are
characterized by equivocality because they allow for
multiple and sometimes conflicting interpretations (Berente
et al., 2011; Weick, 1990). Our study extends work on
sensemaking around digital technologies (Berente et al.,
2011; Gattringer et al., 2021; Gephart, 2004; Weick &
Meader, 1993) in three ways.

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
200
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
First, we highlight the sociotechnical focus (Sarker et al.,
2019) of sensemaking around emerging technologies by
describing it as a discursive process (Stigliani & Ravasi,
2012) that unfolds simultaneously through iterative
reconceptualizations that consider technical aspects of the
technology, its potential uses, and its associated roles. The
case we studied always featured the understanding that all
three elements must be considered because they are
interrelated, and changes in the understanding of one
element would require changes in the others. That is, while
we can detail the iterative reconceptualizations through
abstraction and elaboration along three dimensions,
reconceptualizations in one dimension are always in relation
to the conceptual understanding of the other dimensions,
highlighting the relational aspect of sensemaking around
technologies (Mesgari & Okoli, 2019). Through this process,
actors can place certain elements in the foreground or the
background. In the case of making a law, the conceptual
development of roles, including their obligations and
responsibilities, is placed in the foreground. Future research
could study this phenomenon in relation to other emerging
technologies and explore the diachronic aspect of how sense
is made over time (Rotolo et al., 2015) and how prominence
is given to certain elements of a technology.
The second way in which our study extends work on
sensemaking around digital technologies is that our case
suggests viewing sensemaking around emerging
technologies in terms of identifying the “essence” of a
technology. This essence is a construction, as it represents
what those involved in the sensemaking process agree are
the essential properties of a technology that falls under the
legal provision. The essence of a technology is an abstract
idea that represents qualities that are shared by particular (or
less abstract) things, which Locke (1847) refers to as
“nominal” or “abstracted” essence (as opposed to “real
essence,” the individual constitution that makes a thing what
it is). Therefore, since the essence of a technology relates to
those who were involved in the sensemaking process, it may
change over time and across legal contexts and may even
change its level of abstraction to pertain to more or fewer
instances or instances that share other characteristics.
In the case we studied, for example, “trustworthiness”
represents a central idea related to the integrity of tokens,
which comprises an aspect of the essence of the technology.
However, someone observing what actors considered
essential about the technology at an earlier stage in the
sensemaking process might have thought that using
distributed ledgers to keep data was the essence of the
technology. However, the sensemaking process involving
abstraction and elaboration made explicit what really
mattered about the technology (Leonardi, 2012), changing
the group’s understanding of the technology’s essence. From
a sociotechnical perspective, the essence is a conceptual idea
that allows a technology’s aspects in terms of the technology
itself, its uses, and its associated roles to be tied together.
Future research could focus on how collaborative
sensemaking leads to identifying the essence of digital and
emerging technologies, including AI. For instance, the
European Parliament (2023b) conceives of AI as “the ability
of a machine to display human-like capabilities such as
reasoning, learning, planning and creativity,” which gives us
a sense of the essence of that technology from its point of
view.
Third, we highlight how the interrelated processes of
abstraction and elaboration allow actors to create shared,
collective meaning despite the equivocal nature of technology.
As both abstraction and elaboration begin from some
understanding and move to some other understanding,
retaining the properties of the technology, its uses, and its
associated roles that actors collectively identify as important
or essential is possible. Abstraction—and the identification of
a technology’s essence—allows for a variety of perspectives
around the dimensions of the technology’s materiality, uses,
and roles to be accommodated. Elaboration helps make the
abstract understanding tangible—and, in our case, amenable
to regulation—and links the elements of the regulatory
outcome in terms of the technology, its uses, and its associated
roles. Future research could study the roles of abstraction and
elaboration in overcoming inaction and engaging in collective
action in the context of institutional construction, even when
actors’ individual interests do not necessarily favor
cooperation (Wijen & Ansari, 2007).
Implications for Practice
To navigate the process of regulating emerging technologies
using multiple perspectives, we suggest that regulators should
increase and (conceivably) also decrease their level of
abstraction regarding regulatory targets and shift emphasis
among the various perspectives. That is, regulators should
navigate a solution space that is comprised of multiple levels
of abstraction and specificity across the interrelated
dimensions of technology, its uses, and its associated roles.
Changes in one element of the conceptual understanding are
associated with changes in other elements. Our findings can
thus support “policy entrepreneurs” (Wiener, 2004) in their
construction of innovative regulations.
Increasing the level of abstraction can help to accommodate
multiple perspectives, create consensus, and construct
shared meaning. Therefore, we suggest that actors who are
involved in the regulatory process should consider
abstraction and elaboration in their sensemaking around the
technology. While abstraction can address the need to

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
201
increase innovation friendliness, elaboration can address the
need for regulatory specificity and integration to facilitate
enforcement. While our study highlights a move from a
specific technology to a more abstract understanding of
technology, reducing the level of abstraction and thus
narrowing the boundaries of the class of technologies that
fall under the provision could also be a strategy.
Shifting the focus from one dimension—e.g., technology—to
another can help shift the focus from regulating technology to
adjusting laws and regulations for sociotechnical change
(Bennett Moses, 2017), that is, to elements that are relevant in
the face of sociotechnical change. For instance, focusing on
the outcomes that certain material aspects of a technology may
produce can help regulators think about how the broader legal
context—laws and regulations—can accommodate new
capabilities or practices or how that context should be adjusted
(Bennett Moses, 2017).
Finally, this more nuanced understanding of moving between
implementation specificity and neutrality, specific uses and
emergent uses, and specific roles and abstract roles can help
address key problems with the lack of precision of the concept
of technology neutrality (Bennett Moses, 2017; Koops, 2006;
Reed, 2007). These problems include those of prediction, as
regulation is made with the current technology in mind;
penumbra, which refers to uncertainty about how a regulation
actually applies; perspective, which focuses on the use that a
technology facilitates versus the design that enables that use;
and pretense, which refers to the fact that technology
neutrality is based on judgment calls that may, for instance,
exclude future developments (Greenberg, 2015). This
sociotechnical perspective allows regulators to consider
specific social contexts, such as the specific uses of the
technology’s deployment (Nissenbaum, 2004; Pfaffinger,
2022). Therefore, abstraction and elaboration are mechanisms
by which actors who are involved in regulatory efforts can
move between general applicability and context specificity
and decide on a level of abstraction that is sufficiently
innovation friendly but that also provides the specificity
required for regulations to be effective and enforceable.
Limitations
We examined one case in a small state. While Liechtenstein
shares key regulatory elements with larger states, larger
institutional systems are likely to require different processes
and more and different kinds of actors. We also did not
consider the entire process but mostly focused on the
sensemaking element that was involved in constructing the
regulatory framework before it was debated in Parliament and
eventually took force. Future research could extend this
perspective by analyzing the interactions that occur when a
legislature rejects a regulation, requires it to be revised, and so
on. To address these limitations, we related our study to the
existing literature and used existing concepts whenever
possible so that we could generalize from the idiosyncratic
detail of our study (Orlikowski, 1993) and move to the level
of formal concepts (Urquhart et al., 2010), including
sensemaking practices.
Conclusion
Our analysis highlights how prospective sensemaking around
emerging technologies relies on the role of the interrelated
processes of abstraction and elaboration in identifying what it
is that matters about a technology (abstraction) and the details,
requirements, and explanations that support the regulatory
goals of creating legal certainty and protecting users
(elaboration). Balancing specificity and abstraction across the
dimensions of technology, uses, and associated roles could
address some of the criticisms of technology-neutral
regulation and facilitate institutional construction around
emerging technologies.
Acknowledgments
We express our gratitude to the senior editor, Eivor Oborn, and the
associate editor, Lisen Selander, for their detailed, constructive, and
developmental feedback, which helped us shape our work and
enhanced our framing, theoretical contribution, and implications.
We are also indebted to the team of anonymous reviewers for their
insightful feedback and suggestions. We would further like to thank
Nick Berente, Thomas Grisold, Aron Lindberg, Monika Pfaffinger,
and Jan Recker for their invaluable comments on various drafts of
our paper.
References
Abbott, A. (1990). A primer on sequence methods. Organization
Science, 1(4), 375-392. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1.4.375
Beaumier, G., Kalomeni, K., Campbell‐Verduyn, M., Lenglet, M.,
Natile, S., Papin, M., Rodima‐Taylor, D., Silve, A., & Zhang, F.
(2020). Global regulations for a digital economy: Between new
and old challenges. Global Policy, 11(4), 515-522.
https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12823
Beck, R. (2018). Beyond Bitcoin: The rise of blockchain world.
Computer, 51(2), 54-58. https://doi.org/10.1109/MC.2018.
1451660
Beck, R., Müller-Bloch, C., & King, J. L. (2018). Governance in the
blockchain economy: A framework and research agenda. Journal
of the Association for Information Systems, 19(10), 1020-1034.
https://doi.org/10.17705/1jais.00518
Bennett Moses, L. (2013). How to think about law, regulation and
technology: Problems with “technology” as a regulatory target.

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
202
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
Law, Innovation and Technology, 5(1), 1-20. https://doi.org/
10.5235/17579961.5.1.1
Bennett Moses, L. (2017). Regulating in the face of sociotechnical
change. In R. Brownsword, E. Scotford, & K. Yeung (Eds.), The
Oxford handbook of law, regulation and technology
(pp. 573-596). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/
oxfordhb/9780199680832.013.49
Berente, N., Hansen, S., Pike, J. C., & Bateman, P. J. (2011). Arguing
the value of virtual worlds: Patterns of discursive sensemaking of
an innovative technology. MIS Quarterly, 35(3), 685-709.
https://doi.org/10.2307/23042804
Bolander, P., & Sandberg, J. (2013). How employee selection decisions
are made in practice. Organization Studies, 34(3), 285-311.
https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840612464757
Braun, E., & Wield, D. (1994). Regulation as a means for the social
control of technology. Technology Analysis & Strategic
Management, 6(3), 259-272. https://doi.org/10.1080/09537329
408524171
Brownsword, R. (2020). Law 3.0: Rules, regulation, and technology.
Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003053835
Brownsword, R., Scotford, E., & Yeung, K. (2017). Law, regulation,
and technology: The field, frame, and focal questions. In R.
Brownsword, E. Scotford, & K. Yeung (Eds.), The Oxford
handbook of law, regulation and technology (pp. 3-38). Oxford
University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199
680832.013.1
Butenko, A., & Larouche, P. (2015). Regulation for innovativeness or
regulation of innovation? Law, Innovation and Technology, 7(1),
52-82. https://doi.org/10.1080/17579961.2015.1052643
Butler, T., Gozman, D., & Lyytinen, K. (2023). The regulation of and
through information technology: Towards a conceptual ontology
for IS research. Journal of Information Technology, 38(2), 86-107.
https://doi.org/10.1177/02683962231181147
Chan, J., & Bennett Moses, L. (2017). Making sense of big data for
security. British Journal of Criminology, 57(2), 299-319.
https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azw059
Chen, Y. (2018). Blockchain tokens and the potential democratization
of entrepreneurship and innovation. Business Horizons, 61(4), 567-
575. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bushor.2018.03.006
Collingridge, D. (1980). The social control of technology. St. Martin’s
Press.
Colomy, P. (1998). Neofunctionalism and neoinstitutionalism: Human
agency and interest in institutional change. Sociological Forum,
13(2), 265-300. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1022193816858
Corley, K. G., & Gioia, D. A. (2011). Building theory about theory
building: What constitutes a theoretical contribution? Academy of
Management Review, 36(1), 12-32. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.
2009.0486
Cross, J., Earl, M. J., & Sampler, J. L. (1997). Transformation of the IT
Function at British Petroleum. MIS Quarterly, 21(3), 401-423.
https://doi.org/10.2307/249721
Davidson, E. J., & Chismar, W. G. (2007). The interaction of
institutionally triggered and technology-triggered social structure
change: An investigation of computerized physician order entry.
MIS Quarterly, 31(4), 739-758. https://doi.org/10.2307/25148818
De Vaujany, F.-X., Fomin, V. V., Haefliger, S., & Lyytinen, K. (2018).
Rules, practices, and information technology: A trifecta of
organizational regulation. Information Systems Research, 29(3),
755-773. https://doi.org/10.1287/isre.2017.0771
Dervin, B. (1999). Chaos, order and sense-making: A proposed theory
for information design. In R. Jacobson (Ed.), Information design
(pp. 35-57). MIT Press.
European Parliament. (2023a, December 19). EU AI Act: first
regulation on artificial intelligence. https://www.europarl.
europa.eu/news/en/headlines/society/20230601STO93804/eu-ai-
act-first-regulation-on-artificial-intelligence
European Parliament. (2023b, June 20). What is artificial intelligence
and how is it used? https://www.europarl.europa.eu/
pdfs/news/expert/2020/9/story/20200827STO85804/20200827ST
O85804_en.pdf
Finck, M. (2018). Blockchain regulation and governance in Europe.
Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/97811086
09708
Fligstein, N. (1997). Social skill and institutional theory. American
Behavioral Scientist, 40(4), 397-405. https://doi.org/10.1177/
0002764297040004003
Friesl, M., Ford, C. J., & Mason, K. (2019). Managing technological
uncertainty in science incubation: A prospective sensemaking
perspective. R&D Management, 49(4), 668-683. https://doi.org/
10.1111/radm.12356
Gattringer, R., Damm, F., Kranewitter, P., & Wiener, M. (2021).
Prospective collaborative sensemaking for identifying the potential
impact of emerging technologies. Creativity and Innovation
Management, 30(3), 651-673. https://doi.org/10.1111/caim.12432
Gephart, R. P., Jr. (2004). Sensemaking and new media at work.
American Behavioral Scientist, 48(4), 479-495. https://doi.org/
10.1177/0002764204270283
Gephart, R., Topal, C., & Zhang, Z. (2012). Future-oriented
sensemaking: Temporalities and institutional legitimation. In T.
Hernes & S. Maitlis (Eds.), Process, sensemaking, and organizing
(pp. 275-300). Oxford University Press.
Gioia, D. A. (2006). On Weick: An appreciation. Organization Studies,
27(11), 1709-1721. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840606068349
Gioia, D. A., & Chittipeddi, K. (1991). Sensemaking and sensegiving
in strategic change initiation. Strategic Management Journal,
12(6), 433-448. https://doi.org/10.1002/smj.4250120604
Gioia, D. A., Corley, K. G., & Fabbri, T. (2002). Revising the past
(while thinking in the future perfect tense). Journal of
Organizational Change Management, 15(6), 622-634.
https://doi.org/10.1108/09534810210449532
Giunchiglia, F., & Walsh, T. (1992). A theory of abstraction. Artificial
Intelligence, 57(2-3), 323-389. https://doi.org/10.1016/0004-
3702(92)90021-O
Gornitzka, Å., & Sverdrup, U. (2008). Who consults? The
configuration of expert groups in the European Union. West
European Politics, 31(4), 725-750. https://doi.org/10.1080/
01402380801905991
Greenberg, B. A. (2015). Rethinking technology neutrality. Minnesota
Law Review, 100, 1495-1562.
Grover, V., & Lyytinen, K. (2023). The pursuit of innovative theory in
the digital age. Journal of Information Technology, 38(1), 45-59.
https://doi.org/10.1177/02683962221077112
Hacker, P., Engel, A., & Mauer, M. (2023). Regulating ChatGPT and
other large generative AI models. In Proceedings of the ACM
Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency.
https://doi.org/10.1145/3593013.3594067
Henningsson, S., & Eaton, B. D. (2023). Governmental regulation and
digital infrastructure innovation: The mediating role of modular

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
203
architecture. Journal of Information Technology, 38(2), 126-143.
https://doi.org/10.1177/02683962221114429
Herian, R. (2018). Regulating blockchain: Critical perspectives in law
and technology. Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/978042
9489815
Hinings, B., Gegenhuber, T., & Greenwood, R. (2018). Digital
innovation and transformation: An institutional perspective.
Information and Organization, 28(1), 52-61. https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.infoandorg.2018.02.004
Kiviat, T. I. (2015). Beyond Bitcoin: Issues in regulating blockchain
tranactions. Duke Law Journal, 65, 569-608.
Klein, G., Moon, B., & Hoffman, R. R. (2006). Making sense of
sensemaking 1: Alternative perspectives. IEEE Intelligent Systems,
4, 70-73. https://doi.org/10.1109/MIS.2006.75
Klein, H. K., & Myers, M. D. (1999). A set of principles for conducting
and evaluating interpretive field studies in information systems.
MIS Quarterly, 23(1), 67-93. https://doi.org/10.2307/249410
Kokshagina, O., Reinecke, P. C., & Karanasios, S. (2023). To regulate
or not to regulate: unravelling institutional tussles around the
regulation of algorithmic control of digital platforms. Journal of
Information Technology, 38(2), 160-179. https://doi.org/10.1177/
02683962221114408
Koops, B.-J. (2006). Should ICT regulation be technology-neutral? In
B.-J. Koops, C. Prins, M. Schellekens, & M. Lips (Eds.), Starting
points for ICT regulation: Deconstructing prevalent policy one-
liners (pp. 77-108). Springer
Kosti, N., Levi-Faur, D., & Mor, G. (2019). Legislation and regulation:
three analytical distinctions. The Theory and Practice of
Legislation, 7(3), 169-178. https://doi.org/10.1080/20508840.
2019.1736369
Kramer, J. (2007). Is abstraction the key to computing?
Communications of the ACM, 50(4), 36-42. https://doi.org/
10.1145/1232743.1232745
Langley, A. (1999). Strategies for theorizing from process data.
Academy of Management Review, 24(4), 691-710. https://doi.org/
10.5465/amr.1999.2553248
Leonardi, P. M. (2012). Materiality, sociomateriality, and socio-
technical systems: What do these terms mean? How are they
related? Do we need them? In P. M. Leonardi, B. A. Nardi, & J.
Kallinikos (Eds.), Materiality and organizing: Social interaction in
a technological world (pp. 25-48). Oxford University Press.
Locke, J. (1847). An essay concerning human understanding. Kay &
Troutman.
Louis, M. R. (1980). Surprise and sense making: What newcomers
experience in entering unfamilar organizational settings.
Administrative Science Quarterly, 25(2), 226-251. https://doi.org/
10.2307/2392453
Madiega, T. (2023). Artificial intelligence act. European
Parliamentary Research Service. https://superintelligenz.eu/wp-
content/uploads/2023/07/EPRS_BRI2021698792_EN.pdf
Maitlis, S., & Christianson, M. (2014). Sensemaking in organizations:
Taking stock and moving forward. The Academy of Management
Annals, 8(1), 57-125. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2014.
873177
Maitlis, S., Vogus, T. J., & Lawrence, T. B. (2013). Sensemaking and
emotion in organizations. Organizational Psychology Review,
3(3), 222-247.. https://doi.org/10.1177/2041386613489062
Mandel, G. N. (2009). Regulating emerging technologies. Law,
Innovation and Technology, 1(1), 75-92. https://doi.org/10.1080/
17579961.2009.11428365
Mendling, J., Weber, I., Aalst, W. V. D., Brocke, J. V., Cabanillas, C.,
Daniel, F., Debois, S., Ciccio, C. D., Dumas, M., Dustdar, S.,
Avigdor, G., García-Bañuelos, L., Governatori, G., Hull, R., La
Rosa, M., Leopold, H., Leymann, F., Recker, J., Reichert, M.,
Reijers, H. A., … Zhu, L. (2018). Blockchains for business process
management: Challenges and opportunities. ACM Transactions on
Management Information Systems, 9(1), 1-16. https://doi.org/
10.1145/3183367
Mesgari, M., & Okoli, C. (2019). Critical review of organisation-
technology sensemaking: Towards technology materiality,
discovery, and action. European Journal of Information Systems,
28(2), 205-232. https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2018.1524420
Miles, M. B., Huberman, A. M., & Saldana, J. (2013). Qualitative data
analysis: A methods sourcebook. SAGE.
Nägele, T. (2022). The legal nature of tokens under Liechtenstein's
TVTG with special consideration of the Token Container Model
{T}. DLT Media.
Natarajan, H., Krause, S., & Gradstein, H. (2017). Distributed ledger
technology (DLT) and blockchain. World Bank Group.
Nissenbaum, H. (2004). Privacy as contextual integrity. Washington
Law Review, 79, 119-158.
Nofer, M., Gomber, P., Hinz, O., & Schiereck, D. (2017). Blockchain.
Business & Information Systems Engineering, 59(3), 183-187.
https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-017-0467-3
Orlikowski, W. J. (1993). CASE tools as organizational change:
Investigating incremental and radical changes in systems
development. MIS Quarterly, 17(3), 309-340. https://doi.org/
10.2307/249774
Pfaffinger, M. (2022). Das Recht auf informationellen Systemschutz.
Nomos. https://doi.org/10.5771/9783748936046
Rasmussen, A., & Toshkov, D. (2013). The effect of stakeholder
involvement on legislative duration: Consultation of external
actors and legislative duration in the European Union. European
Union Politics, 14(3), 366-387. https://doi.org/10.1177/1465116
513489777
Reed, C. (2007). Taking sides on technology neutrality. SCRIPT-ed,
4(3), 263-284.
Rotolo, D., Hicks, D., & Martin, B. R. (2015). What is an emerging
technology? Research Policy, 44(10), 1827-1843. https://doi.org/
10.1016/j.respol.2015.06.006
Rubin, H. J., & Rubin, I. S. (2012). Qualitative interviewing: The art of
hearing data (3rd ed.). SAGE.
Saldaña, J. (2009). The coding manual for qualitative researchers.
SAGE.
Sarker, S., Chatterjee, S., Xiao, X., & Elbanna, A. (2019). The
sociotechnical axis of cohesion for the IS discipline: Its historical
legacy and its continued relevance. MIS Quarterly, 43(3), 695-720.
https://doi.org/10.25300/MISQ/2019/13747
Scherer, M. U. (2015). Regulating artificial intelligence systems: Risks,
challenges, competencies, and strategies. Harvard Journal of Law
& Technology, 29(2), 353-400.
Scott, W. R. (2014). Institutions and Organizations: Ideas, Interests,
and Identities (4th ed.). SAGE.
Seidel, S., & Urquhart, C. (2013). On emergence and forcing in
information systems grounded theory studies: The case of Strauss
and Corbin. Journal of Information Technology, 28(3), 237-260.
https://doi.org/10.1057/jit.2013.17
Silva, L., & Hirschheim, R. (2007). Fighting against windmills:
Strategic information systems and organizational deep structures.
MIS Quarterly, 31(2), 327-354. https://doi.org/10.2307/25148794

Seidel et al. / Prospective Sensemaking in Regulating Emerging Technologies
204
MIS Quarterly Vol. 49 No. 1 / March 2025
Stigliani, I., & Ravasi, D. (2012). Organizing thoughts and connecting
brains: Material practices and the transition from individual to
group-level prospective sensemaking. Academy of Management
Journal, 55(5), 1232-1259. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2010.0890
Strauss, A. L., & Corbin, J. (1998). Basics of qualitative research.
Techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory (2nd
ed.). SAGE.
Székely, I., Szabó, M. D., & Vissy, B. (2011). Regulating the future?
Law, ethics, and emerging technologies. Journal of Information,
Communication and Ethics in Society, 9(3), 180-194.
https://doi.org/10.1108/14779961111167658
The White House. (1997). The framework for global electronic
commerce. https://clintonwhitehouse4.archives.gov/WH/New/
Commerce/read.html
Thomas, J. B., Clark, S. M., & Gioia, D. A. (1993). Strategic
sensemaking and organizational performance: Linkages among
scanning, interpretation, action, and outcomes. Academy of
Management Journal, 36(2), 239-270. https://doi.org/10.5465/
256522
Tsukerman, M. (2015). The block is hot: A survey of the state of
Bitcoin regulation and suggestions for the future. Berkeley
Technology Law Journal, 30(4), 1127-1170.
Urquhart, C., Lehmann, H., & Myers, M. D. (2010). Putting the
“theory” back into grounded theory: Guidelines for grounded
theory studies in information systems. Information Systems
Journal, 20(4), 357-381. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2575.
2009.00328.x
von Briel, F., Davidsson, P., & Recker, J. (2018). Digital technologies
as external enablers of new venture creation in the IT hardware
sector. Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, 42(1), 47-69.
https://doi.org/10.1177/1042258717732779
Weick, K. E. (1979). The social psychology of organizing. Addison-
Wesley.
Weick, K. E. (1990). Technology as equivoque: sensemaking in new
technologies. In P. S. Goodman & L. S. Sproull (Eds.), Technology
and organizations. Jossey-Bass.
Weick, K. E. (1995). Sensemaking in organizations (Vol. 3). SAGE.
Weick, K. E., & Meader, D. K. (1993). Sensemaking and group support
systems. In L. M. Jessup & J. S. Valacich (Eds.), Group support
systems: New perspectives (pp. 230-252). Macmillan.
Weick, K. E., Sutcliffe, K. M., & Obstfeld, D. (2005). Organizing and
the process of sensemaking. Organization Science, 16(4), 409-421.
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1050.0133
Wiener, J. B. (2004). The regulation of technology, and the technology
of regulation. Technology in Society, 26(2-3), 483-500.
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2004.01.033
Wijen, F., & Ansari, S. (2007). Overcoming inaction through collective
institutional entrepreneurship: Insights from regime theory.
Organization Studies, 28(7), 1079-1100. https://doi.org/10.1177/
0170840607078115
Yoo, Y., Boland, R. J., Jr., Lyytinen, K., & Majchrzak, A. (2012).
Organizing for innovation in the digitized world. Organization
Science, 23(5), 1398-1408. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1120.0771
About the Authors
Stefan Seidel is a professor of information systems at the University
of Cologne. He studies how emerging technologies like artificial
intelligence are implicated in organizational and institutional change
and innovation. He received his doctoral degree from the University
of Münster in Germany. He is a senior editor for MIS Quarterly and
previously served as an associate editor for MIS Quarterly and
Information Systems Journal.
Christoph J. Frick is a partner and the lead of consulting in
Liechtenstein at EY. His expertise spans strategy and business
development, tech regulation, and risk management, as well as
innovation and transformational leadership. He holds a doctorate
from the University of Liechtenstein. As former personal advisor to
the prime minister he is a valued member of various boards.
Jan vom Brocke is the chair of Information Systems & Business
Process Management at the University of Münster and the director of
the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS). He
is a visiting professor at the University of Liechtenstein and has been
named a Fellow of the AIS, a Schoeller Senior Fellow at Friedrich
Alexander University FAU, a Fellow of the ESCP Center for Design
Science in Entrepreneurship, an Academic Research Fellow at MIT
CISR, and a Distinguished Professor of at the National University of
Ireland, Maynooth.