Christoph Schank

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.

In this article we argue that social science education needs to convey more than operational mechanisms of society. Especially in socio-economic education, questions of business ethics, i.e. phenomena of economics and society need to be integrated and reflected, decidedly focusing on the moral content of economics. With the introduction of economic citizenship as the ideal economic actor to be the purpose of economic education, this paper proposes that economic education needs to connect economic expertise and moral judgment and should also allude to the necessity of every market action's conditional legitimization by society. We propose to discuss different ‘sites' of morality as a heuristic approach to the different areas of economic responsibility. The individual, organizational and political level of responsibility helps to categorize the different moral issues of economic activity and serves as a great pattern to explain economic relations to scholars and students.