Thorsten Busch

Organizations increasingly rely on algorithm-based HR decision-making to monitor their employees. This trend is reinforced by the technology industry claiming that its decision-making tools are efficient and objective, downplaying their potential biases. In our manuscript, we identify an important challenge arising from the efficiency-driven logic of algorithm-based HR decision-making, namely that it shifts the delicate balance between employees’ personal integrity and compliance toward favoring compliance. The reason is that algorithm-based HR decision-making may marginalize human sense-making, promote blind trust in rules, and replace moral imagination. We suggest that critical data literacy, ethical awareness, the use of participatory design methods, and private regulatory regimes within civil society can help overcome these challenges. Our paper contributes to literature on workplace monitoring, critical data studies, personal integrity and literature at the intersection between HR management and corporate responsibility.

From a business ethics perspective, this dissertation studies the role of companies in the information and communication technologies (ICT) sector as regulators with respect to access to knowledge, civic engagement online, and civil liberties on online platforms. To this end, it takes into account three cases: (1.) digital divides and the capabilities of corporate citizens to alleviate them; (2.) Twitter and the normative tension between its role as a platform for civic communication and as a commercial service; (3.) Facebook and its role as a privately owned networked virtual state. An analysis of these cases illustrates that private companies in the ICT sector today effectively have become regulators of public spaces online. This dissertation discusses the normative implications of this development with respect to current corporate citizenship and political CSR (corporate social responsibility) theories. These theories have been focusing on the emerging regulatory role of private enterprises in recent years. However, thus far they have not addressed corporate responsibility issues and corporate regulation in the digital environment. The contribution of this dissertation is that it closes that gap. Full text see [http://www1.unisg.ch/www/edis.nsf/SysLkpByIdentifier/4139/$FILE/dis4139.pdf here]