Disclosive ethics and information technology: disclosing facial recognition systems

This paper is an attempt to present disclosive ethics as a framework for computer and information ethics � in line with the suggestions by Brey, but also in quite a different manner. The potential of such an approach is demonstrated through a disclosive analysis of facial recognition systems. The paper argues that the politics of information technology is a particularly powerful politics since information technology is an opaque technology � i.e. relatively closed to scrutiny. It presents the design of technology as a process of closure in which design and use decisions become black-boxed and progressively enclosed in increasingly complex sociotechnical networks. It further argues for a disclosive ethics that aims to disclose the nondisclosure of politics by claiming a place for ethics in every actual operation of power � as manifested in actual design and use decisions and practices. It also proposes that disclosive ethics would aim to trace and disclose the intentional and emerging enclosure of politics from the very minute technical detail through to social practices and complex social-technical networks. The paper then proceeds to do a disclosive analysis of facial recognition systems. This analysis discloses that seemingly trivial biases in recognition rates of FRSs can emerge as very significant political acts when these systems become used in practice

Picturing algorithmic surveillance: the politics of facial recognition systems

This paper opens up for scrutiny the politics of algorithmic surveillance through an examination of Facial Recognition Systems (FRS's) in video surveillance, showing that seemingly mundane design decisions may have important political consequences that ought to be subject to scrutiny. It first focuses on the politics of technology and algorithmic surveillance systems in particular: considering the broad politics of technology; the nature of algorithmic surveillance and biometrics, claiming that software algorithms are a particularly important domain of techno-politics; and finally considering both the growth of algorithmic biometric surveillance and the potential problems with such systems. Secondly, it gives an account of FRS's, the algorithms upon which they are based, and the biases embedded therein. In the third part, the ways in which these biases may manifest itself in real world implementation of FRS’s are outlined. Finally, some policy suggestions for the future development of FRS’s are made; it is noted that the most common critiques of such systems are based on notions of privacy which seem increasingly at odds with the world of automated systems

The decentered translation of management ideas:Attending to the conditioning flow of everyday work practices

Based on a study of Lean management practices at the Swedish Migration Board, we develop a novel theoretical understanding of the translation of management ideas. We show how translation, rather than being reduced to a network of human intentions and actions governing the transformation of organizational practices, can instead be understood as a historically contingent, situated flow of mundane everyday work practices through which social and material translators simultaneously become translated, conditioned to be and act in certain ways. We show how prior actor-centric accounts of translation of management ideas can be understood as performative consequences of a conceptual vocabulary inherited from Callon and Latour. Contrasting this, the non-actor-centric vocabulary of social anthropologist Tim Ingold allows us to background the intentional human actor and foreground the flow of mundane, situated practices. In adopting this vocabulary, we capture how the flow of practices conditions subjects and objects to become enacted as well as act, and develop an understanding of translation as occurring within, rather than distinct from, these practices. In essence, our novel view of translation emphasizes how management ideas are radically unstable, and subject to alteration through the flow of practices rather than as a result of deliberate implementation efforts

Power, Knowledge and Management Information Systems Education: The Case of the Indian Learner

This paper considers the challenges that arise for Indian students who undertake postgraduate Management Information Systems programmes outside India. We discuss how the educational practices in India differ from those that are required by MIS postgraduate programmes in the UK. Drawing on empirical work that has been conducted in India between November 2005 and January 2006, we highlight some of the key features of the Indian undergraduate education experience before suggesting that these are in contrast to those that Indian students encounter while studying at the postgraduate level in the UK. We argue that MIS programmes also pose significant challenges due to the diverse subject matter that is typically taught and assessed. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, we argue that education processes in both India and the UK are inextricably interlinked to claims about what constitutes legitimate knowledge and the practices that produce and reproduce such claims. Suggestions for change to MIS programmes derive from our analysis

Ensembles of Practice: Older Adults, Technology, and Loneliness & Social Isolation in Rural Settings

This paper considers whether, and if so how, ICT might play a role in addressing loneliness and social isolation for older adults in rural areas. We base our paper on a longitudinal co-creation study that has been undertaken in a rural location in the North of England. We adopt a practice perspective to examine the everyday practices of older adults as they sought out opportunities to address their desire for social connectedness and explore how technology might support them in those practices. Specifically, we argue that we need to identify the linking practices that enable participation in social connectedness through ICT. Based on this, we develop a model to guide future practice based studies and interventions

On the Making of Sense in Sensemaking:Decentred Sensemaking in the Meshwork of Life

This paper proposes and argues for sensemaking practices as fundamentally decentred. Sensemaking has been, at least since the late 1980s, an enduring subject for organisation studies researchers, and much longer for organisational practitioners. This research tradition has, however, tended to have a particular understanding of temporality (as divisible), tended to be centred on the human sense-makers, and privileged as more valid that which can be made present, through deliberative sensemaking practices, at the expense of that which is absent, and perhaps ineffable. In short, by locating sensemaking in the deliberative sensemaking practices of humans other significant constitutive conditions of sensemaking became obscured from view. The main thrust of the paper is to develop a notion of sensemaking that is decentred – not simply at the disposal of human subjects – and where sense is always and already given and made simultaneously. That is, where every human attempt at framing is itself already enframed, significantly. We show how this reimagining of sensemaking, as decentred, has the potential to open up new avenues of research in sensemaking practices – avenues that are more sensitive to temporal flow, the more-than-human, immanence, and the precarity of such practices. This shift is significant theoretically but also practically

Becoming processual: Time to de-place managerial education

Managerial education and managerial research are still deeply emplaced and emplacing phenomena. They are expected to be emplaced somewhere, in bounded space-times and in the powerful subjectivities of students and colleagues, awaiting their expression and expansion. This constitutes a strange extensive continuum which remains the heart of academic work. In this provocative essay, we invite organization scholars to de-place managerial phenomena and to become processual. We use one-block auto-ethnographic vignettes to show that existentiality matters and can lead to different life paths, in particular processual ones. In a final discussion, we offer a manifesto for those interested in cultivating processuality in their work as teachers and academics