Creating Social Cyber Value

"All security outcomes in cyberspace are determined by individual people, whose behaviour is shaped by their social setting, either organisational or cultural. Yet there has been little evidence globally of the necessary adjustment of policy or practice that gives due weight to the social science dimensions.

There is a sharp imbalance between investments in technology for security in cyber space as against social science at almost every level: national government, business enterprise or academia. This shortcoming is compounded by three others of equal or greater importance.

First, the further socio-technical threat of unintended system failures, which may be dubbed “cyber incompetence”, is also largely unstudied outside the technical realm. Yet it may be even more costly and far more common than the more prominent concern for addressing cyber-attacks.

Second, decisions for digital transformation in all organisations can undermine or enhance security, and are in turn impacted by the competence levels of the decision-makers.

Third, the susceptibility of leaders, managers and users to be swayed by disinformation generated by the media or even vendors in fastmoving situations is an equally important threat to business and security.

We see these problem sets as inextricably linked, and argue that we can only analyse any one of them by reference to the idea of the “social cyber ecosystem” in which they all exist. It is their interaction in the shared ecosystem that determines all security and welfare outcomes dependent on cyber space. We argue for the centrality of social science in cyber space management at all levels of national policy, enterprise development and human welfare. We introduce a novel concept to help achieve this reorientation: “creating social cyber value”.

Greg Austin and Glenn Withers, 'Creating Social Cyber Value', Social Cyber Institute, 2019

• Cited in Srinidhi Vasudevan, Anna Piazza, Lavanya Rajendran, Samuel Duraivel,

• 'Mapping the metaverse minefield: A TIPS framework for security-conscious business adoption', Computers & Security, Volume 160, 2026, 104710, ISSN 0167-4048,

• Cited in Babkin, A. V., E. V. Shkarupeta, and V. A. Plotnikov. "Intellectual cybersocial ecosystem of Industry 5.0: concept, essence, model." Economic Revival of Russia 4 (70) (2021): 39–62 [in Russian]

• Reported in ZDNet

• Reported in iStart

• Republished as ‘Creating Social Cyber Value as the Broader Goal’, in Greg Austin ed. Cyber-Security Education Principles and Policies (Abingdon Oxon: Routledge, 2020) 99 – 118

  
  
  
  
  
  

This graphic from the paper illustrates the implication of social science approaches to cyber security.