A Social Perspective on Information Security: Theoretically Grounding the Domain

Abstract

Information security has become a largely rule-based domain, substantially focusing on issues of confidentiality. But the standards developed to achieve this, both in the U.S. and in the UK, have not been adopted as widely as had been hoped. By casting information security as a human-centred domain, this chapter, by means of a critique fom a social theoretical perspective, seeks to offer a way forward to a more widely acceptable approach. Social philosophy, social theory, and empirical evidence all suggest a basis in critical social theory as a potential way forward, and an initial framework based on this, is developed within this study. All of this is seen to point toward information security seen as human action, mediated through subjective understanding, and this research is now focusing on the operationalisation of these concepts.