Sub-theme 59: The Politics and Ethics of Digitalizing Organizations
Call for Papers
In the discourse on ‘digital transformations’, digitalization is often framed as a strategic concern, a necessary component
in new business models, or a technology driven phenomenon. In this sub-theme, we take another approach. We examine digitalization
as an organizational phenomenon, which calls for non-technical considerations about political and ethical dimensions of specific
digital technologies and digitalization projects. Following at least a decade of positive hype about digital transformations,
more concerns about its impact on societies, economies, power relationships, knowledge and individuals’ everyday experience
are now being voiced, and there is rising public and academic debate about the dark sides of digitalization (see also the
forthcoming issue on this theme in Organization). The various contributions show how digital technologies affect
individuals (e.g. Zuboff, 2019), organizations and professions (e.g. Foer, 2017), entire industries (e.g. Taplin, 2017), and
societies (e.g. Morozov, 2011; Zuboff, 2019) in highly problematic and ethically dubious ways. This literature tends to focus
on spectacular cases like the firing of employees based on obscure algorithms (O’Neil, 2017), how predictions generated on
the basis of big data reproduce inequalities (Eubanks, 2017), or how individuals are surveilled and controlled in increasingly
sophisticated ways in the workplace (Head, 2014).
In this sub-theme, we surpass both utopian and dystopian
grand diagnoses and turn to more mundane organizational analyses. By focusing on digitalization as an organizational practice,
we encourage critical and constructive thinking about ‘digital transformations’. Picking up on the 36th EGOS Colloquium
theme, Organizing for a Sustainable Future, we begin to address questions such as how to organize around digital
technologies in a responsible manner.
Scholars have begun to examine various aspects of digitalization as
precisely organizational phenomena, which are “bounded” for instance by socioeconomic factors like the pricing of labor, organizational
power relations and the nature of work tasks (Fleming, 2018). Attention has also been given to how values become inscribed
into algorithms (Kraemer et al., 2011) and how algorithms made to generate ‘decisions’ or grounds for decision-making in ways
that are highly political (Eubanks, 2017); how search engines have a politics of exclusions inscribed into them (Introna &
Nissenbaum, 2000); or how design decisions about video surveillance have important political consequences (Introna & Wood,
2004). The digitalization of organizations, which is based on algorithms, presupposes infrastructures (Bowker et al., 2019),
i.e. processes of analyzing, categorizing, standardizing and relabeling of tasks, elements in workflows, and functions; what
Bowker and Star (1999) have referred to as “sorting things out”. When organizations are digitalized, that is, when work processes
become thoroughly entangled with digital technologies, what looks like technical solutions to efficiency or quality problems
become politically and ethically laden performative aspects of organizational realities.
Studies on professions
and professionals have also highlighted the consequences of new infrastructures for knowledge and expertise (Faraj et al.,
2018), including how the increasing quantification and standardization that algorithms allow for might transform professional
work and identities (Plesner & Raviola, 2016; Beane & Orlikowski, 2015; Plesner et al., 2018; Petrakaki et al., 2016);
how the cooperation around digital technologies reconfigures boundary relations among occupational groups, with important
consequences for e.g. jurisdiction and status (e.g. Barrett et al., 2012); and how digital technologies affording constant
connectivity challenges work life balance and professional autonomy (Mazmanian et al., 2013).
In this sub-theme
we wish to highlight political and ethical aspects of everyday practices related to digitalization (Wajcman, 2015), such as
consequences of replacing professional judgment with automated decision-making in public administration (Justesen & Plesner,
2018) or delegating trading to algorithms on trade floors (Beunza & Millo, 2015; Lange et al., 2018). It has been argued
that the opaqueness of algorithmic decision-making poses serious democratic questions because criteria for decision-making
processes remain out of sight (Eubanks, 2017). Their black-boxed status forecloses important political and ethical debates
and might produce new forms of inequalities that seemingly nobody can be held accountable for. Others have argued that algorithms
are not inherently opaque, but call for precisely ethical discussions of how algorithmic accountability is both possible and
desirable (Neyland, 2016).
We think organization studies should be able to help practitioners deconstruct
‘the digital transformation’, move from abstract worries or discussions of ‘disruption’ and ‘the future work force’, and engage
with particular technological solutions in specific organizational settings with attention to the values, politics and ethics
inscribed into digital technologies in practice. As Fleming (2019: 32) suggests in the context of his discussion of robotics,
organization studies as a field needs to “speak out about the pressing ethical topics confronting organizations and society
today”. Organization studies have the ability to contribute with analyses and concepts, which may help practitioners navigate
digitalization projects. For instance, the notion of “blended automation” (Beunza & Millo, 2015) directs attention to
where social cues and human interaction is needed and automation needs to be bounded. Or “the management of visibilities”
(Flyverbom et al., 2016) helps us understand that the visibility afforded by digital technologies is not a given, but a phenomenon
that is constructed – and can be constructed in different ways.
We invite both empirical and conceptual contributions
that develop organizational perspectives on the politics and ethics of digitalization by engaging with themes such as (but
not limited to):
The politics of automating work
Ethical aspects of automating decision-making
Responsible management of digitalization projects
Connections/disconnections between digitalization strategies and organizational goals and values
Political implications of specific organizational digitalization projects
Digitalization, diversity and inequality
Digitalization and new forms of accountability
Boundary work and the reshaping of expertise around digitalization and automation projects
Organizational consequences of quantification
References
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- Beunza, D., & Millo, Y. (2015): Blended Automation: Integrating Algorithms on the Floor of the New York Stock Exchange. SRC Discussion Paper No. 38. London: London School of Economics.
- Bowker, G.C., & Star, S.L. (1999): Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
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