Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Department of Economic and Social Sciences, on October 11th–12th, 2024, Piacenza, Italy
Advances in technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), intelligent robots, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, blockchain, and augmented and virtual reality are continuing to have a significant impact on organizations, and society as a whole. Sometimes described as 'exponential technologies' referring to their growth along and beyond the lines of Moore's Law, these digital and data-driven approaches are reconfiguring the practical, analytical, and spatial dimensions of organizations and shaping new societal and organizational futures. For example, generative AI tools such as ChatGPT have already become critical tools for businesses and people raising huge debates about whether and how they can contribute to or challenge business sustainability, and employee wellbeing.
While it is unsurprising and, to some extent encouraging, that businesses are keeping up with new technologies and seeking to improve their effectiveness and resilience, such innovations also expose employees and organizations to new risks and threats. For employees, they have implications for privacy, autonomy, opportunities, income, and well-being, as well as freedom from bias or discrimination. For organizations, they have operational, financial, and legal implications, especially as the European Union and other global regions seek to better regulate the uses of data and AI, which can cascade into reputational damage. At a societal level, they pose risks for potentially amplifying biases and raising concerns about the reinforcement and perpetuation of existing inequalities. For instance, one key point for the latter refers to sustainability which is currently at the center of both scientific and practitioner debate. It is important to understand here the contribution or threats of technologies to the achievement of the United Nation's 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) focusing on social inclusion, and the Decent Future of Work, among many others. Thus, overall, it is unclear what the long-term impacts of exponential technologies will be, and organizations face managerial and organizational dilemmas as they seek to embrace innovation whilst also avoiding harms and penalties. More knowledge and understanding of how these technologies are evolving and being used, as well as their soft and hard impacts, are therefore needed for the goal of 'human-centeredness' and sustainability in organizations to be achieved.
We invite submissions from multi-disciplinary practitioners and researchers critically reflecting on and analyzing ethical and trust issues around exponential technologies in organizations and their implications for stakeholders, and society. We welcome conceptual and empirical contributions, reviews, case studies, experience-in-the-field reports, and debate papers inspired by interdisciplinary, multi-level, multi-stakeholder, multi-method, and culture-sensitive approaches that could address existing and future challenges and uncertainties, define an agenda for future research, and provide good practice recommendations and instruments for designing and evaluating human-centered, trustworthy, and sustainable technologies in organizations.
Track main topics
A non-exhaustive list of relevant research topics includes:
• Trust issues in relation to exponential technologies
• Conceptualizing responsible adoption and use of exponential technologies for employees, groups, and organizations
• Potential and perils of exponential technologies for diversity and inclusion (e.g., discrimination, bias, or inequalities) in organizations
• Organizational and managerial dilemmas related to the development, implementation, and use of human-centered, responsible, and sustainable exponential technologies and approaches to address them
• Employee dilemmas for recognizing/using exponential technologies at/for work
• Cases on transparent (and not) uses of AI at/for work in organizations of different types (e.g., SMEs or multinationals) and coming from different sectors (e.g., healthcare, public or private sector companies)
• Human versus algorithmic decision making
• Spatial, temporal, and behavioral work boundaries affected by exponential technologies
• Critical stakeholders in the responsible and human-centered application of exponential technologies at/for work (technology, developers, managers, employees, or organizations)
• Ethics washing in AI at work
• Existing and new (critical) theories, models, methodologies, and frameworks for studying and evaluating exponential technologies
• Sustainability of exponential technologies and organizations adopting them
• The role and/or impact of technologies on SDGs
• Guidelines and approaches for developing, implementing, or using ethical, sustainable, and human-centered exponential technologies for organizations