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1. Using Design Fiction Memos to Analyze UX Professionals’ Values Work Practices: A Case Study Bridging Ethnographic and Design Futuring Methods

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445709  

   Wong, Richmond Y. (May 2021, Human factors in computing systems)

   null (Ed.)

   Multiple methods have been used to study how social values and ethics are implicated in technology design and use, including empirical qualitative studies of technologists’ work. Recently, more experimental approaches such as design fiction explore these themes through fictional worldbuilding. This paper combines these approaches by adapting design fictions as a form of memoing, a qualitative analysis technique. The paper uses design fiction memos to analyze and reflect on ethnographic interviews and observational data about how user experience (UX) professionals at large technology companies engage with values and ethical issues in their work. The design fictions help explore and articulate themes about the values work practices and relationships of power that UX professionals grapple with. Through these fictions, the paper contributes a case study showing how design fiction can be used for qualitative analysis, and provides insights into the role of organizational and power dynamics in UX professionals’ values work. 

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2. Exploring Alignment Between Engineering Students’ Job Plans and Post-Graduation Outcomes. Paper presented at

   Rüde, L; Harris, A; Gilmartin, S; Sheppard, S. (October 2018, IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE), San Jose, CA, USA, 2018. IEEE)

   This Research-to-Practice Full Paper investigates engineering students’ career goals and intentions regarding organizational settings, and how their goals and intentions relate to their background, learning and contextual measures. Moreover, despite vocational choice and turnover having been heavily studied in the literature, few studies have examined how students’ career goals relate to change in their organizational settings over time and how these perceptions then influence their turnover intentions. To fill in this research gap, this paper explores how organizational setting and respondent aspiration to be in that setting relate to turnover intentions. The paper is based on the nationally-representative, longitudinal Engineering Majors Survey and has a sample size of 350 respondents, characterized as employed and recently graduated (<2y) from an undergraduate engineering program. Respondents are categorized in three different alignment groups (Aligned, Fluid, Unaligned) according to their career goal achievement. Respondents who are currently employed in the type of organization, they had imagined being employed at a year earlier are called Aligned. Respondents who are actually employed in the type of organization (e.g., small versus large firm) to which they stated “Might or might not” be employed a year earlier are classified as Fluid. Finally, respondents, who work in the organizational setting, which they did not want to work in one year prior, are called Unaligned. The paper also determines respondents turnover intentions (Stay, Flexible, Go) related to organizational settings, such as small companies or medium and large companies. Alignment and turnover groups were then compared with each other in relation to background, learning, and contextual measures. Background measures are gender, underrepresented minority status, and first generation to college status. Learning measures are internship experience, and contextual measures are job satisfaction and grade point average. The findings suggest that most of these recent graduates are Aligned and want to Stay in their organizational setting. Employees in small companies are relatively less Aligned and are more likely to Go and leave the organizational setting than are employees in large companies. Respondents who have done an internship are more often Aligned and less likely want to Go and leave their organizational setting than those who have not done an internship. These results suggest that many respondents decide before graduation on an organizational setting and continue to desire the same organizational setting after being employed for some time. Future longitudinal research should compare organizational settings-based turnover intentions with turnover intentions related to specific companies, -as a complement to much of the in literature on turnover intentions mostly refers to leaving specific organizations. Keywords: career decisions, labor turnover intentions, organizational setting, engineering graduates, alignment 

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3. Exploring Alignment Between Engineering Students’ Job Plans and Post-Graduation Outcomes

   Rude, L.; Harris, A.; Gilmartin, S.; Sheppard, S. (January 2018, Proceedings of the 48th Annual Frontiers in Education (FIE) Conference, October 3-6, 2018. San Jose, California.)

   This Research-to-Practice Full Paper investigates engineering students’ career goals and intentions regarding organizational settings, and how their goals and intentions relate to their background, learning and contextual measures. Moreover, despite vocational choice and turnover having been heavily studied in the literature, few studies have examined how students’ career goals relate to change in their organizational settings over time and how these perceptions then influence their turnover intentions. To fill in this research gap, this paper explores how organizational setting and respondent aspiration to be in that setting relate to turnover intentions. The paper is based on the nationally-representative, longitudinal Engineering Majors Survey and has a sample size of 350 respondents, characterized as employed and recently graduated (<2y) from an undergraduate engineering program. Respondents are categorized in three different alignment groups (Aligned, Fluid, Unaligned) according to their career goal achievement. Respondents who are currently employed in the type of organization, they had imagined being employed at a year earlier are called Aligned. Respondents who are actually employed in the type of organization (e.g., small versus large firm) to which they stated “Might or might not” be employed a year earlier are classified as Fluid. Finally, respondents, who work in the organizational setting, which they did not want to work in one year prior, are called Unaligned. The paper also determines respondents turnover intentions (Stay, Flexible, Go) related to organizational settings, such as small companies or medium and large companies. Alignment and turnover groups were then compared with each other in relation to background, learning, and contextual measures. Background measures are gender, underrepresented minority status, and first generation to college status. Learning measures are internship experience, and contextual measures are job satisfaction and grade point average. The findings suggest that most of these recent graduates are Aligned and want to Stay in their organizational setting. Employees in small companies are relatively less Aligned and are more likely to Go and leave the organizational setting than are employees in large companies. Respondents who have done an internship are more often Aligned and less likely want to Go and leave their organizational setting than those who have not done an internship. These results suggest that many respondents decide before graduation on an organizational setting and continue to desire the same organizational setting after being employed for some time. Future longitudinal research should compare organizational settings-based turnover intentions with turnover intentions related to specific companies, -as a complement to much of the in literature on turnover intentions mostly refers to leaving specific organizations. Keywords: career decisions, labor turnover intentions, organizational setting, engineering graduates, alignment 

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4. Languaging Ethics in Technology Practice

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3656468  

   Gray, Colin M.; Chivukula, Shruthi Sai; Johns, Janna; Will, Matthew; Obi, Ike; Li, Ziqing (April 2024, ACM Journal on Responsible Computing)

   Ethics as embodied by technology practitioners resists simple definition—particularly as it relates to the interplay of identity, organizational, and professional complexity. In this paper we use the linguistic notion of languaging as an analytic lens to describe how technology and design practitioners negotiate their conception of ethics as they reflect upon their everyday work. We engaged twelve practitioners in individual co-creation workshops, encouraging them to reflect on their ethical role in their everyday work through a series of generative and evaluative activities. We analyzed these data to identify how each practitioner reasoned about ethics through language and artifacts, finding that practitioners used a range of rhetorical tropes to describe their ethical commitments and beliefs in ways that were complex and sometimes contradictory. Across three cases, we describe how ethics was negotiated through language across three key zones of ecological emergence: the practitioner’s “core” beliefs about ethics, internal and external ecological elements that shaped or mediated these core beliefs, and the ultimate boundaries they reported refusing to cross. Building on these findings, we describe how the languaging of ethics reveals opportunities to definitionally and practically engage with ethics in technology ethics research, practice, and education. 

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5. Values in Emotion Artificial Intelligence Hiring Services: Technosolutions to Organizational Problems

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3579543  

   Roemmich, Kat; Rosenberg, Tillie; Fan, Serena; Andalibi, Nazanin (April 2023, Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction)

   Despite debates about emotion artificial intelligence's (EAI) validity, legality, and social consequences, EAI is increasingly present in the high stakes context of hiring, with potential to shape the future of work and the workforce. The values laden in technology play a significant role in its societal impact.We conducted qualitative content analysis on the public-facing websites (N=229) of EAI hiring services. We identify the organizational problems that EAI hiring services claim to solve and reveal the values emerging in desired EAI uses as promoted by EAI hiring services to solve organizational problems. Our findings show that EAI hiring services market their technologies as technosolutions to three purported organizational hiring problems: 1) hiring (in)accuracy, 2) hiring (mis)fit, and 3) hiring (in)authenticity. We unpack these problems to expose how these desired uses of EAI are legitimized by the corporate ideals of data-driven decision making, continuous improvement, precision, loyalty, and stability. We identify the unfair and deceptive mechanisms by which EAI hiring services claim to solve the purported organizational hiring problems, suggesting that they unfairly exclude and exploit job candidates through EAI's creation, extraction, and affective commodification of a candidate's affective value through pseudoscientific approaches. Lastly, we interrogate EAI hiring service claims to reveal the core values that underpin their stated desired use: techno-omnipresence, techno-omnipotence, and techno-omniscience. We show how EAI hiring services position desired use of their technology as a moral imperative for hiring organizations with supreme capabilities to solve organizational hiring problems, then discuss implications for fairness, ethics, and policy in EAI-enabled hiring within the US policy landscape. 

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