Excerpt in lieu of abstract: Ethics is arguably the hottest product in Silicon Valley's hype cycle today, even as headlines decrying a lack of ethics in technology companies accumulate. After years of largely fruitless outside pressure to consider the consequences of digital technology products, the very recent past has seen a spike in the assignment of corporate resources in Silicon Valley to ethics, including hiring staff for roles we identify here as "ethics owners." In corporate parlance, "owning" a portfolio or project means holding responsibility for it, often across multiple divisions or hierarchies within the organization. Typically, the "owner" of a project does not bear sole responsibility for it, but rather oversees integration of that project across the organization.
A remarkable range of internal and external challenges and responses tends to fall under a single analytic framework called "ethics." This strains an already broad term that in some contexts means an open-ended philosophical investigation into moral conditions of human experience and, in other contexts, means the bureaucratized expectations of professional behavior. Likewise, it places strain on corporate structures because it is bureaucratically challenging to disambiguate whether these problems belong in the domain of legal review, human resources, engineering practices, and/or business models and strategy.
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Owning Ethics: Corporate Logics, Silicon Valley, and the Institutionalization of Ethics
Ethics is arguably the hottest product in Silicon Valley's hype cycle today, even as headlines decrying a lack of ethics in technology companies accumulate. After years of largely fruitless outside pressure to consider the consequences of digital technology products, the very recent past has seen a spike in the assignment of corporate resources in Silicon Valley to ethics, including hiring staff for roles we identify here as "ethics owners." In corporate parlance, "owning" a portfolio or project means holding responsibility for it, often across multiple divisions or hierarchies within the organization. Typically, the "owner" of a project does not bear sole responsibility for it, but rather oversees integration of that project across the organization.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1633400
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10125494
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Social research
- Volume:
- 86
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 1944-768X
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 449-476
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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