Business ethics and quantification: towards an ethics of numbers
Social practices of quantification, or the production and communication of numbers, have been recognized as important foundations of organizational knowledge, as well as sources of power. With the advent of increasingly sophisticated digital tools to capture and extract numerical data from social li...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Interlibrary Loan: | Interlibrary Loan for the Fachinformationsdienste (Specialized Information Services in Germany) |
| Published: |
2022
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| In: |
Journal of business ethics
Year: 2022, Volume: 176, Issue: 2, Pages: 195-211 |
| Further subjects: | B
Quantification
B Technologies of control B Aufsatz in Zeitschrift B Datafication |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | Social practices of quantification, or the production and communication of numbers, have been recognized as important foundations of organizational knowledge, as well as sources of power. With the advent of increasingly sophisticated digital tools to capture and extract numerical data from social life, however, there is a pressing need to understand the ethical stakes of quantification. The current study examines quantification from an ethical lens, to frame and promote a research agenda around the ethics of quantification. After a brief overview of quantification research and its uses in state and market organization, I discuss quantification in terms of three core subprocesses—capture, specification, and appropriation, illustrating and identifying ethical concerns around each process. Linking these processes to the performative effects of measures, I present a working model of quantification from which the discussion builds ideas for developing a research agenda around quantification. |
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| ISSN: | 1573-0697 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of business ethics
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1007/s10551-020-04694-z |