WHEN IS A GOAL A GOAL? ADDRESSING EQUIVOCALITY WITH TECHNOLOGY.

Video assistant Referee (VAR) was introduced in football (soccer) to minimize errors directly affecting the match result. As a socio-technical intervention in the sport of football to support decision-making, there is tension between real-world contexts that lack objectivity and the application of information systems to make sense of them. In this research, we set out to offer new insights for information systems research by demonstrating this fundamental but hitherto neglected tension arising from the use of technology to reason about events and execute tasks. Using an initial sample of 27 VAR errors, we demonstrate the challenge of using information systems to faithfully represent subjective events. Our initial analysis outlines emergent concepts that help to explain the incidents analyzed, which serves as the orienting framework for our findings. Our findings suggest that information systems may not necessarily offer answers to messy, complex and subjective matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]