New Challenges to Enlightenment: Why Socio-Technological Conditions Lead to Organized Immaturity and What to Do About it

Neesham, Cristina

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3753612

Cited by 8 publications

(32 citation statements)

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“…As a third contribution, this article augments our understanding of the emerging concept of organised immaturity (Scherer & Neesham, 2021. It identifies and explores the underlying drivers of such immaturity, namely, the undermining of rational agency and the distortion of authorship.…”

Section: Implications For Theory and Practicementioning

confidence: 98%

“…In such cases, society should protect employees, whether through democratically established rules or pressure through negative publicity (Forst, 2012: 181). Meanwhile, hidden influences can be exposed by whistle-blowers, investigative journalists, and ethical hackers (Scherer & Neesham, 2021). At a minimum, public discourse can help employees strengthen their metaautonomy by becoming more aware of potential digital workplace nudges.…”

Section: The Role Of the State And Societymentioning

confidence: 99%

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The Moral Permissibility of Digital Nudging in the Workplace: Reconciling Justification and Legitimation

Ruehle

2023

Bus. Ethics Q.

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Organisations increasingly use digital nudges to influence their workforces’ behaviour without coercion or incentives. This can expose employees to arbitrary domination by infringing on their autonomy through manipulation and indoctrination. Nudges might furthermore give rise to the phenomenon of “organised immaturity.” Adopting a balanced approach between overly optimistic and dystopian standpoints, I propose a framework for determining the moral permissibility of digital nudging in the workplace. In this regard, I argue that not only should organisations provide pre-discursive justification of nudges but they should also ensure that employees can challenge their implementation whenever necessary through legitimation procedures. Building on Rainer Forst’s concept of the right to justification, this article offers a way to combine contract- and deliberation-based theories for addressing questions in business ethics. I further introduce the concept of meta-autonomy as a capacity that employees can acquire to counter threats of arbitrary domination and to mitigate organised immaturity.

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Section: Implications For Theory and Practicementioning

confidence: 98%

Section: The Role Of the State And Societymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Moral Permissibility of Digital Nudging in the Workplace: Reconciling Justification and Legitimation

Ruehle

2023

Bus. Ethics Q.

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“…Immaturity, by contrast, is characterized by the absence or lack of development of such capabilities and by the individual's decision-making becoming increasingly subjected to forms of external direction and manipulation. In the latter case, Kant also spoke of the propensity for "self-inflicted" immaturity as the situation in which individuals quite willingly surrender their autonomy in favor of being directed through life by an external power (see also Scherer & Neesham, 2020).…”

Section: Organized Immaturity In the Digital Agementioning

confidence: 99%

“…From the structural "enslavement" or "fixation" of individual subjectivities in premodern and medieval societies to restrictions of individual autonomy through legal, disciplinary, and control mechanisms in modern bureaucratic and capitalist societies, the possibilities for individual autonomy have always been restricted in certain ways under various institutional regimes (Berger & Luckmann, 1991) and constellations of power (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013;Foucault, 2007). However, argue Scherer and Neesham (2020), the advent of the fourth industrial revolution, in which digital and data-driven technologies have consolidated as a driving force for societal development, presents new challenges to the project of the Enlightenment, as it has cultivated new and more sophisticated forms of organized immaturity among individuals and collectives. Examples are potentially manifold, from the capabilities of data-driven technologies and "big data" analytics to guide, influence, and manipulate purchasing and voting behavior to "smart" devices-or entire infrastructures, such as "smart cities"-that continuously make decisions for and manage the lives of the humans whose digitally monitored behavior, in turn, feeds the system with continuous flows of data.…”

Section: Organized Immaturity In the Digital Agementioning

confidence: 99%

“…But what is the potential of such data transparency practices as a means of reorganizing individual maturity in the digital age? Whereas Scherer and Neesham (2020) point to regulatory interventions like GDPR as, indeed, a potentially effective way of combating organized immaturity and reinstating individual maturity in the context of digitalization, the goal of this article is to delve further into the complexities and potential "dark sides" (see Trittin-Ulbrich, Scherer, Munro, & Whelan, 2021) of data transparency to problematize the assumption that new organizational transparency practices necessarily foster maturity. On the contrary, as I will argue, under certain conditions, organizational data transparency itself comes to produce new forms of organized immaturity, thus deeply problematizing its capacity as a potential countermechanism.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Dark Sides of Data Transparency: Organized Immaturity After GDPR?

Schade

2023

Bus. Ethics Q.

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Organized immaturity refers to the capacity of widely institutionalized sociotechnical systems to challenge qualities of human enlightenment, autonomy, and self-determination. In the context of surveillance capitalism, where these qualities are continuously put at risk, data transparency is increasingly proposed as a means of restoring human maturity by allowing individuals insight and choice vis-à-vis corporate data processing. In this article, however, I draw on research on General Data Protection Regulation–mandated data transparency practices to argue that transparency—while potentially fostering maturity—itself risks producing new forms of organized immaturity by facilitating user ignorance, manipulation, and loss of control of personal data. Considering data transparency’s relative “successes” and “failures” regarding the cultivation of maturity, I outline a set of possible remedies while arguing for a general need to develop more sophisticated ethical appreciations of transparency’s complex and potentially problematic implications for organized (im)maturity in the digital age.

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