Business Ethics and Quantification: Towards an Ethics of Numbers

Critical positions: Situating critical perspectives in work and organizational psychology

“…In terms of the methods and techniques linked to W-O psychology, literature on selection and recruitment in workplace contexts are often focused on technical issues of measurement validity and utility (Sackett & Lievens, 2008); however, such contexts are key moments in the formation of economic and status hierarchies (Dick & Nadin, 2006), and thus rich in potential critical insights that need to be studied. More generally, critical views on measurement and psychometrics can interrogate how the conversion of human relations into data artifacts can be problematic both epistemically and politically (cf., Islam, 2021).…”

“…Practically, psychologists may come to question whether their work serves more to control working people's behavior than to help them flourish, and aspire to centralize the interests of less-powerful groups in the research process (Sugarman, 2005). Methodologically, they may be frustrated by demands to truncate complex human experiences into simplified constructs and measurements, desiring instead to harness diverse methodologies and resist pressures to translate their constructs into monetary terms (Islam, 2021). Socially, they may feel constrained to frame social, economic and political dynamics as matters of individual cognition, affect and behavior, obscuring rather than clarifying the sources of worker experience and limiting alternatives to the organizational status quo (Christopher & Hickinbottom, 2008).…”

Business Ethics Quarterly Special Issue on: Organizational Ethics of Life and Death

“…Fostering an ethics of care seems fundamental in counter-balancing abstract, and disembodied notions of morality to re-connect organizational ethics with the needs for a livable (work)life. Organizational processes and tools, including ways of measuring and quantifying life processes, threats and activities (cf, Islam, 2022; Pérezts, Andersson, & Lindebaum, 2021), are infused with underlying ethical stakes that ultimately shape our understanding of issues around life and death.…”

The Metrics of Ethics and the Ethics of Metrics

“…The previous points focused on measurement aspects of ethics in their "representational" capacity-that is, how metrics selectively reflect aspects of reality in ways that can be partial, biased or misleading. Less common but increasingly pressing is scholarship around what can be termed the "performative" capacity of metrics-their ability to shape the world in their image and to bring new social realities into being (Islam, 2021). The representational and performative aspects of metrics are interlinked, and one may operate through the other.…”

“…From the daily public health briefings of pandemic illness tolls and vaccination rates, the measurement and reporting of climate emissions and biodiversity impacts, the inflation and bursting of economic bubbles in the financialized marketplace or the quantified selves made possible by digital technologies, social media and connected surveillance, technologies of measurement are increasingly woven into the fabric of social life. As these diverse social phenomena increasingly demand measurement (Islam, 2021), Business Ethics as a field is challenged to develop metrics that can adequately measure ethics, and to think through the ethics of how, when and with whom to construct such metrics. Conversely, business ethics scholarship, as much of social scientific scholarship generally, has been slow to pick up on the implications of metrics as themselves sources of ethical and social value, and as measurement as an ethically laden activity (cf., Järvinen et al, 2020, for a recent example).…”