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Trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life

Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press (1995)

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  1. Value Capture.Christopher Nguyen - 2024 - Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 27 (3).
    Value capture occurs when an agent’s values are rich and subtle; they enter a social environment that presents simplified — typically quantified — versions of those values; and those simplified articulations come to dominate their practical reasoning. Examples include becoming motivated by FitBit’s step counts, Twitter Likes and Re-tweets, citation rates, ranked lists of best schools, and Grade Point Averages. We are vulnerable to value capture because of the competitive advantage that such crisp and clear expressions of value have in (...)
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  • Ethics Inside the Black Box: Integrating Science and Technology Studies into Engineering and Public Policy Curricula.Christopher Lawrence, Sheila Jasanoff, Sam Weiss Evans, Keith Raffel & L. Mahadevan - 2023 - Science and Engineering Ethics 29 (4):1-31.
    There is growing need for hybrid curricula that integrate constructivist methods from Science and Technology Studies (STS) into both engineering and policy courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. However, institutional and disciplinary barriers have made implementing such curricula difficult at many institutions. While several programs have recently been launched that mix technical training with consideration of “societal” or “ethical issues,” these programs often lack a constructivist element, leaving newly-minted practitioners entering practical fields ill-equipped to unpack the politics of knowledge (...)
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  • Statistics as Figleaves.Felix Bräuer - 2023 - Topoi 42 (2):433-443.
    Recently, Jennifer Saul (“Racial Figleaves, the Shifting Boundaries of the Permissible, and the Rise of Donald Trump”, 2017; “Racist and Sexist Figleaves”, 2021) has explored the use of what she calls “figleaves” in the discourse on race and gender. Following Saul, a figleaf is an utterance that, for some portion of the audience, blocks the conclusion that some other utterance, R, or the person who uttered R is racist or sexist. Such racial and gender figleaves are pernicious, says Saul, because, (...)
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  • Promises and Pitfalls of Algorithm Use by State Authorities.Maryam Amir Haeri, Kathrin Hartmann, Jürgen Sirsch, Georg Wenzelburger & Katharina A. Zweig - 2022 - Philosophy and Technology 35 (2):1-31.
    Algorithmic systems are increasingly used by state agencies to inform decisions about humans. They produce scores on risks of recidivism in criminal justice, indicate the probability for a job seeker to find a job in the labor market, or calculate whether an applicant should get access to a certain university program. In this contribution, we take an interdisciplinary perspective, provide a bird’s eye view of the different key decisions that are to be taken when state actors decide to use an (...)
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  • Objectivity for the research worker.Noah van Dongen & Michał Sikorski - 2021 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 11 (3):1-25.
    In the last decade, many problematic cases of scientific conduct have been diagnosed; some of which involve outright fraud others are more subtle. These and similar problems can be interpreted as caused by lack of scientific objectivity. The current philosophical theories of objectivity do not provide scientists with conceptualizations that can be effectively put into practice in remedying these issues. We propose a novel way of thinking about objectivity for individual scientists; a negative and dynamic approach.We provide a philosophical conceptualization (...)
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  • Values in Psychometrics.Lisa D. Wijsen, Denny Borsboom & Anna Alexandrova - forthcoming - Perspectives on Psychological Science.
    When it originated in the late 19th century, psychometrics was a field with both a scientific and a social mission: psychometrics provided new methods for research into individual differences, and at the same time, these psychometric instruments were considered a means to create a new social order. In contrast, contemporary psychometrics - due to its highly technical nature and its limited involvement in substantive psychological research - has created the impression of being a value-free discipline. In this article, we develop (...)
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  • The seductions of clarity.C. Thi Nguyen - 2021 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 89:227-255.
    The feeling of clarity can be dangerously seductive. It is the feeling associated with understanding things. And we use that feeling, in the rough-and-tumble of daily life, as a signal that we have investigated a matter sufficiently. The sense of clarity functions as a thought-terminating heuristic. In that case, our use of clarity creates significant cognitive vulnerability, which hostile forces can try to exploit. If an epistemic manipulator can imbue a belief system with an exaggerated sense of clarity, then they (...)
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  • How Twitter gamifies communication.C. Thi Nguyen - 2021 - In Jennifer Lackey (ed.), Applied Epistemology. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. pp. 410-436.
    Twitter makes conversation into something like a game. It scores our communication, giving us vivid and quantified feedback, via Likes, Retweets, and Follower counts. But this gamification doesn’t just increase our motivation to communicate; it changes the very nature of the activity. Games are more satisfying than ordinary life precisely because game-goals are simpler, cleaner, and easier to apply. Twitter is thrilling precisely because its goals have been artificially clarified and narrowed. When we buy into Twitter’s gamification, then our values (...)
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  • Hat sizes and craniometry: Professional know-how and scientific knowledge.Peter Cryle - 2021 - History of the Human Sciences 34 (2):46-65.
    This article examines the relation between commercial activity and knowledge-making, looking at hatmakers in order to open up a more general question about the overlap between the knowledge practices of 19th-century science and those of everyday commercial culture of the time. Phrenology also claims attention here, since it can be said to have occupied an intermediate position between science and commerce. From time to time during the first half of the century, phrenologists attended to hatmakers in the hope of gleaning (...)
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  • Rescuing Objectivity: A Contextualist Proposal.Jack Wright - 2018 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 48 (4):385-406.
    Ascriptions of objectivity carry significant weight. But they can also cause confusion because wildly different ideas of what it means to be objective are common. Faced with this, some philosophers have argued that objectivity should be eliminated. I will argue, against one such position, that objectivity can be useful even though it is plural. I will then propose a contextualist approach for dealing with objectivity as a way of rescuing what is useful about objectivity while acknowledging its plurality.
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  • (1 other version)On the Possibility of a Paratelic Initiation of Organizational Wrongdoing.Mikko Vesa, Frank den Hond & J. Tuomas Harviainen - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 160 (1):1-15.
    In terms of reversal theory, both dominant and alternative explanations of the initiation of organizational wrongdoing assume that its perpetrators act in a telic state of mind. This leaves us with explanations of organizational wrongdoing that are insufficiently appreciative of the agent’s experience. The human mind can be creative and imaginative, too, and people can fully immerse in their activity. We suggest that the paratelic state of mind is relevant for the phenomenological understanding of the initiation of original, creative, daring (...)
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  • Measurement in Science.Eran Tal - 2015 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
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  • Quantifying the quiet epidemic.Duncan Wilson - 2014 - History of the Human Sciences 27 (5):126-146.
    During the late 20th century numerical rating scales became central to the diagnosis of dementia and helped transform attitudes about its causes and prevalence. Concentrating largely on the development and use of the Blessed Dementia Scale, I argue that rating scales served professional ends during the 1960s and 1970s. They helped old age psychiatrists establish jurisdiction over conditions such as dementia and present their field as a vital component of the welfare state, where they argued that ‘reliable modes of diagnosis’ (...)
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  • Sustainability Ratings and the Disciplinary Power of the Ideology of Numbers.Mohamed Chelli & Yves Gendron - 2013 - Journal of Business Ethics 112 (2):187-203.
    The main purpose of this paper is to better understand how sustainability rating agencies, through discourse, promote an “ideology of numbers” that ultimately aims to establish a regime of normalization governing social and environmental performance. Drawing on Thompson’s (Ideology and modern culture: Critical social theory in the era of mass communication, 1990 ) modes of operation of ideology, we examine the extent to which, and how, the ideology of numbers is reflected on websites and public documents published by a range (...)
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  • Feminist perspectives on science.Alison Wylie, Elizabeth Potter & Wenda K. Bauchspies - 2010 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    **No longer the current version available on SEP; see revised version by Sharon Crasnow** -/- Feminists have a number of distinct interests in, and perspectives on, science. The tools of science have been a crucial resource for understanding the nature, impact, and prospects for changing gender-based forms of oppression; in this spirit, feminists actively draw on, and contribute to, the research programs of a wide range of sciences. At the same time, feminists have identified the sciences as a source as (...)
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  • Can understanding undermine explanation? The confused experience of revolution.Charles Kurzman - 2004 - Philosophy of the Social Sciences 34 (3):328-351.
    This article makes six points, using evidence from the Iranian Revolution of 1979: (1) Causal mechanisms, indeed all explanations, imply certain inner states on the part of individuals. (2) The experience of revolution is dominated by confusion. (3) People involved in revolutions act largely in response to their best guesses about how others are going to act. (4) These guesses and responses can shift swiftly and dramatically, in ways that participants and observers cannot predict. (5) Explanation involves retroactive prediction: it (...)
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  • “Conducted Properly, Published Incorrectly”: The Evolving Status of Gel Electrophoresis Images Along Instrumental Transformations in Times of Reproducibility Crisis.Nephtali Callaerts, Alexandre Hocquet & Frédéric Wieber - 2023 - Berichte Zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 46 (2-3):233-258.
    For the last ten years, within molecular life sciences, the reproducibility crisis discourse has been embodied as a crisis of trust in scientific images. Beyond the contentious perception of “questionable research practices” associated with a digital turn in the production of images, this paper highlights the transformations of gel electrophoresis as a family of experimental techniques. Our aim is to analyze the evolving epistemic status of generated images and its connection with a crisis of trust in images within that field.From (...)
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  • (1 other version)The Average Isn’t Normal: The History and Cognitive Science of an Everyday Scientific Practice.Henry Cowles & Joshua Knobe - 2023 - In Uriah Kriegel (ed.), Oxford Studies in Philosophy of Mind Vol. 3. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    Within contemporary science, it is common practice to compare data points to the average, i.e., to the statistical mean. Because this practice is so familiar, it might at first appear not to be the sort of thing that requires explanation. But recent research in cognitive science and in the history of science gives us reason to adopt the opposite perspective. Cognitive science research on the ways people ordinarily make sense of the world suggests that, instead of using a purely statistical (...)
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  • Measuring the non-existent: validity before measurement.Kino Zhao - 2023 - Philosophy of Science 90 (2):227–244.
    This paper examines the role existence plays in measurement validity. I argue that existing popular theories of measurement and of validity follow a correspondence framework, which starts by assuming that an entity exists in the real world with certain properties that allow it to be measurable. Drawing on literature from the sociology of measurement, I show that the correspondence framework faces several theoretical and practical challenges. I suggested the validity-first framework of measurement, which starts with a practice-based validation process as (...)
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  • Phrenology and the average person, 1840–1940.Fenneke Sysling - 2021 - History of the Human Sciences 34 (2):27-45.
    The popular science of phrenology is known for its preoccupation with geniuses and criminals, but this article shows that phrenologists also introduced ideas about the ‘average’ person. Popular phrenologists in the US and the UK examined the heads of their clients to give an indication of their character. Based on the publications of phrenologists and on a large collection of standardized charts with clients’ scores, this article analyses their definition of what they considered to be the ‘average’. It can be (...)
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  • Contested Numbers: The failed negotiation of objective statistics in a methodological review of Kinsey et al.’s sex research.Tabea Cornel - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (1):1-32.
    From 1950 to 1952, statisticians W.G. Cochran, C.F. Mosteller, and J.W. Tukey reviewed A.C. Kinsey and colleagues’ methodology. Neither the history-and-philosophy of science literature nor contemporary theories of interdisciplinarity seem to offer a conceptual model that fits this forced interaction, which was characterized by significant power asymmetries and disagreements on multiple levels. The statisticians initially attempted to exclude all non-technical matters from their evaluation, but their political and personal investments interfered with this agenda. In the face of McCarthy’s witch hunts, (...)
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  • The Value of Calculations: The Coproduction of Theorycraft and Player Practices.Kristine Ask - 2016 - Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society 36 (3):190-200.
    This article investigates the use and effect of optimizing strategies in the online game World of Warcraft. Specifically, it looks at the phenomenon known as “theorycrafting,” wherein expert players reverse engineer the game and use its underlying algorithms to calculate maximized play strategies. Play from a theorycrafting perspective is about the correct input and output of numbers, challenging the narrative of play as something free and frivolous. Seeking to understand how play and knowledge relate to each other, the article discusses (...)
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  • Transgressive Competence: The Narrative of Expertise.Helga Nowotny - 2000 - European Journal of Social Theory 3 (1):5-21.
    Relying on a powerful collective narrative through which political, legal and social decision-making is guided in the name of science, the authority of scientific experts reaches beyond the boundaries of their certified knowledge base. Therefore, expertise constitutes and is constituted by transgressive competence. The author argues that (1) changes in the decision-making structure of liberal Western democracies and changes in the knowledge production system diminish the authority of scientific expertise while increasing the context-dependency of expertise - thereby altering the nature (...)
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  • Textocracy, or, the cybernetic logic of French theory.Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan - 2020 - History of the Human Sciences 33 (1):52-79.
    This article situates the emergence of cybernetic concepts in postwar French thought within a longer history of struggles surrounding the technocratic reform of French universities, including Marcel Mauss’s failed efforts to establish a large-scale centre for social-scientific research with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, the intellectual and administrative endeavours of Claude Lévi-Strauss during the 1940s and 1950s, and the rise of communications research in connection with the Centre d’Études des Communications de Masse (CECMAS). Although semioticians and poststructuralists used cybernetic discourse (...)
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  • (1 other version)Die Wurzeln der Idiographischen Paläontologie: Karl Alfred von Zittels Praxis und sein Begriff des Fossils.Marco Tamborini - 2015 - NTM Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Wissenschaften, Technik und Medizin 23 (3-4):117-142.
    This paper examines Karl Alfred von Zittel’s practice in order to uncover the roots of so-called idiographic paleontology. The great American paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941–2002) defined the discipline of idiographic paleontology as illustration and description of the morphological features of extinct species. However, this approach does not investigate macroevolutionary patterns and processes. On the contrary, the paleobiological revolution of the 1970s implemented an epistemic methodology that illustrates macrovelutionary patterns and laws by combining idiographic data with a nomothetic form of (...)
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  • Equality, Liberty and the Limits of Person-centred Care’s Principle of Co-production.Gabriele Badano - 2019 - Public Health Ethics 12 (2):176-187.
    The idea that healthcare should become more person-centred is extremely influential. By using recent English policy developments as a case study, this article aims to critically analyse an important element of person-centred care, namely, the belief that to treat patients as persons is to think that care should be ‘co-produced’ by formal healthcare providers and patients together with unpaid carers and voluntary organizations. I draw on insights from political philosophy to highlight overlooked tensions between co-production and values like equality and (...)
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  • The objectivity of Subjective Bayesianism.Jan Sprenger - 2018 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 8 (3):539-558.
    Subjective Bayesianism is a major school of uncertain reasoning and statistical inference. It is often criticized for a lack of objectivity: it opens the door to the influence of values and biases, evidence judgments can vary substantially between scientists, it is not suited for informing policy decisions. My paper rebuts these concerns by connecting the debates on scientific objectivity and statistical method. First, I show that the above concerns arise equally for standard frequentist inference with null hypothesis significance tests. Second, (...)
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  • The Cartesian Heritage of Bloom’s Taxonomy.Brett Bertucio - 2017 - Studies in Philosophy and Education 36 (4):477-497.
    This essay seeks to contribute to the critical reception of Bloom’s Taxonomy of Educational Objectives by tracing the Taxonomy’s underlying philosophical assumptions. Identifying Bloom’s work as consistent with the legacy of Cartesian thought, I argue that its hierarchy of behavioral objectives provides a framework for certainty and communicability in ascertaining student learning. However, its implicit rejection of intuitive knowledge as well as its antagonism between the human subject and the known object promote the Enlightenment ideal of education as “intellectual work.” (...)
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  • A Dutch treat: randomized controlled experimentation and the case of heroin-maintenance in the Netherlands.Trudy Dehue - 2002 - History of the Human Sciences 15 (2):75-98.
    In 1995, the Dutch Minister of Health proposed that a randomized clinical trial (RCT) with heroin-maintenance for severe abusers be conducted. It took nearly four years of lengthy debates before the Dutch Parliament consented to the plan. Apart from the idea of prescribing heroin, the minister and her scientific advisers had to defend the quite high material and non-material costs that would arise from employing the randomized controlled design. They argued that the RCT represented the truly scientific approach and was (...)
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  • Science as (Historical) Narrative.M. Norton Wise - 2011 - Erkenntnis 75 (3):349-376.
    The traditional mode of explanation in physics via deduction from partial differential equations is contrasted here with explanation via simulations. I argue that the different technologies employed constitute different languages, which support different sorts of narratives. The narratives that accompany simulations and articulate their meaning are typically historical or natural historical in kind. They explain complex phenomena by growing them rather than by referring them to general laws. Examples of such growth simulations and growth narratives come from the evolution of (...)
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  • Values as heuristics: a contextual empiricist account of assessing values scientifically.Christopher ChoGlueck & Elisabeth A. Lloyd - 2023 - Synthese 201 (6):1-29.
    Feminist philosophers have discussed the prospects for assessing values empirically, particularly given the ongoing threat of sexism and other oppressive values influencing science and society. Some advocates of such tests now champion a “values as evidence” approach, and they criticize Helen Longino’s contextual empiricism for not holding values to the same level of empirical scrutiny as other claims. In this paper, we defend contextual empiricism by arguing that many of these criticisms are based on mischaracterizations of Longino’s position, overstatements of (...)
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  • The Overfishing Problem: Natural and Social Categories in Early Twentieth-Century Fisheries Science.Gregory Ferguson-Cradler - 2021 - Journal of the History of Biology 54 (4):719-738.
    This article looks at how fisheries biologists of the early twentieth century conceptualized and measured overfishing and attempted to make it a scientific object. Considering both theorizing and physical practices, the essay shows that categories and understandings of both the fishing industry and fisheries science were deeply and, at times, inextricably interwoven. Fish were both scientific and economic objects. The various models fisheries science used to understand the world reflected amalgamations of biological, physical, economic, and political factors. As a result, (...)
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  • A box, a trough and marbles: How the Reed-Frost epidemic theory shaped epidemiological reasoning in the 20th century.Lukas Engelmann - 2021 - History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 43 (3):1-24.
    The article takes the renewed popularity and interest in epidemiological modelling for Covid-19 as a point of departure to ask how modelling has historically shaped epidemiological reasoning. The focus lies on a particular model, developed in the late 1920s through a collaboration of the former field-epidemiologists and medical officer, Wade Hampton Frost, and the biostatistician and population ecologist Lowell Reed. Other than former approaches to epidemic theory in mathematical formula, the Reed-Frost epidemic theory was materialised in a simple mechanical analogue: (...)
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  • The Allure and impossibility of an algorithmic future: a lesson from Patočka’s supercivilisation.Ľubica Učník - 2021 - Studies in East European Thought 73 (3):249-270.
    Our experience of the present is defined by numbers, graphs and, increasingly, an algorithmically calculated future, based on the mathematical and formal reasoning that began with the rise of modern science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Today, this reasoning is further modified and extended in the form of computer-executed, algorithmic reasoning. Instead of fallible human reasoning, algorithms—based on mining databases for ‘information’—are seen to provide more efficient processes, offering fast solutions. In this paper, then, I will follow Jan Patočka, (...)
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  • Business Ethics and Quantification: Towards an Ethics of Numbers.Gazi Islam - 2021 - Journal of Business Ethics 176 (2):195-211.
    Social practices of quantification, or the production and communication of numbers, have been recognized as important foundations of organizational knowledge, as well as sources of power. With the advent of increasingly sophisticated digital tools to capture and extract numerical data from social life, however, there is a pressing need to understand the ethical stakes of quantification. The current study examines quantification from an ethical lens, to frame and promote a research agenda around the ethics of quantification. After a brief overview (...)
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  • Problematizing global educational governance of oecd Pisa: Student achievement, categorization, and social inclusion and exclusion.Jonghun Kim - 2020 - Educational Philosophy and Theory 52 (14):1483-1492.
    This study problematizes the global educational governance of OECD PISA and its statistical data as a governing technology in contemporary discourses of education reforms. The study examines princi...
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  • Numbering the mind: Questionnaires and the attitudinal public.Jacy L. Young - 2017 - History of the Human Sciences 30 (4):32-53.
    During the interwar years psychologists Louis Leon Thurstone and Rensis Likert produced newly standardized forms of questionnaires. Both built on developments in mental testing, including the use of restricted sets of answers and the emergence of statistical techniques, to create questionnaires that employed numerical scaling. This transformation in shape of questionnaires was intimately tied up with both psychologists’ nominal subject of investigation: attitudes. Efforts to render psychology a socially valuable and influential science spurred psychologists to create sophisticated and increasingly precise (...)
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  • The Role of Screenings Methods and Risk Profile Assessments in Prevention and Health Promotion Programmes: An Ethnographic Analysis.Yvonne J. F. M. Jansen & Antoinette A. de Bont - 2010 - Health Care Analysis 18 (4):389-401.
    In prevention and health promotion interventions, screening methods and risk profile assessments are often used as tools for establishing the interventions’ effectiveness, for the selection and determination of the health status of participants. The role these instruments fulfil in the creation of effectiveness and the effects these instruments have themselves remain unexplored. In this paper, we have analysed the role screening methods and risk profile assessments fulfil as part of prevention and health promotion programmes in the selection, enrolment and participation (...)
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  • Testing treatments, managing life: on the history of randomized clinical trials: Harry M. Marks, The Progress of Experiment: Science and Therapeutic Reform in the United States, 1900-1990.Trudy Dehue - 1999 - History of the Human Sciences 12 (1):115-124.
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  • Numerical operations, transparency illusions and the datafication of governance.Hans Krause Hansen - 2015 - European Journal of Social Theory 18 (2):203-220.
    Building on conceptual insights from the history and sociology of numbers, media and surveillance studies, and theories of governance and risk, this article analyzes the forms of transparency produced by the use of numbers in social life. It examines what it is about numbers that often makes their ‘truth claims’ so powerful, investigates the role that numerical operations play in the production of retrospective, real-time and anticipatory forms of transparency in contemporary politics and economic transactions, and discusses some of the (...)
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  • Making Quantitative Research Work: From Positivist Dogma to Actual Social Scientific Inquiry.Michael J. Zyphur & Dean C. Pierides - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 167 (1):49-62.
    Researchers misunderstand their role in creating ethical problems when they allow dogmas to purportedly divorce scientists and scientific practices from the values that they embody. Cortina, Edwards, and Powell help us clarify and further develop our position by responding to our critique of, and alternatives to, this misleading separation. In this rebuttal, we explore how the desire to achieve the separation of facts and values is unscientific on the very terms endorsed by its advocates—this separation is refuted by empirical observation. (...)
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  • Statistics and Probability Have Always Been Value-Laden: An Historical Ontology of Quantitative Research Methods.Michael J. Zyphur & Dean C. Pierides - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 167 (1):1-18.
    Quantitative researchers often discuss research ethics as if specific ethical problems can be reduced to abstract normative logics (e.g., virtue ethics, utilitarianism, deontology). Such approaches overlook how values are embedded in every aspect of quantitative methods, including ‘observations,’ ‘facts,’ and notions of ‘objectivity.’ We describe how quantitative research practices, concepts, discourses, and their objects/subjects of study have always been value-laden, from the invention of statistics and probability in the 1600s to their subsequent adoption as a logic made to appear as (...)
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  • How to include socio-economic considerations in decision-making on agricultural biotechnology? Two models from Kenya and South Africa.Koen Beumer - 2019 - Agriculture and Human Values 36 (4):669-684.
    This article contributes to the debate about how regulatory science for agricultural technologies can be ‘opened up’ for a more diverse set of concerns and knowledges. The article focuses on the regulation of ‘socio-economic considerations’ for genetically modified organisms. While numerous countries have declared their intent to include these considerations in biotechnology decision-making, it is currently unclear both what counts as a socio-economic consideration and how such considerations should be assessed. This article provides greater clarity about how socio-economic considerations can (...)
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  • Reductionism in epigenetics.Stephen T. Casper - 2018 - History of the Human Sciences 31 (1):132-135.
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  • A history of the data present. [REVIEW]David Beer - 2021 - History of the Human Sciences 34 (3-4):385-398.
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  • Logic of Choice or Logic of Care? Uncertainty, Technological Mediation and Responsible Innovation.Christopher Groves - 2015 - NanoEthics 9 (3):321-333.
    The regulation of innovation reflects a specific imaginary of the role of governance that makes it external to the field it governs. It is argued that this decision and rule-based view of regulation is insufficient to deal with the inescapable uncertainties that are produced by innovation. In particular, relying on risk-based knowledge as the basis of regulation fails to deal sufficiently both with the problem that innovation ensures the future will not resemble the past, and with the problem that the (...)
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  • Reflexivity and the psychologist.Jill G. Morawski - 2005 - History of the Human Sciences 18 (4):77-105.
    Psychologists tend to examine their activities in experimentation with the same objective scientific attitude as they routinely assume in the experimental situation. A few psychologists have stepped outside this closed expistemic practice to undertake reflexive analysis of the psychologist in the laboratory. Three cases of such critical reflexive analysis are considered to better understand the strategies and consequences of confronting what Steve Woolgar has called ‘the horrors of reflexivity’. Reflexive work of William James, Horace Mann Bond, and Saul Rosenzweig are (...)
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  • Just Look at the Numbers: A Case Study on Quantification in Corporate Environmental Disclosures.Janne T. Järvinen, Matias Laine, Timo Hyvönen & Hannele Kantola - 2020 - Journal of Business Ethics 175 (1):23-44.
    This paper sheds further light on the role of quantification in corporate environmental disclosures. Quantification is an inherently social practice, which has attracted a fair amount of academic interest in recent years. At the same time, in the field of social and environmental accounting there is a paucity of research on quantification or the role it plays for organisations, for organisational communication and in societies more broadly. Accordingly, in this paper, we will draw on a qualitative case study to discuss (...)
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  • The Challenges of Algorithm-Based HR Decision-Making for Personal Integrity.Ulrich Leicht-Deobald, Thorsten Busch, Christoph Schank, Antoinette Weibel, Simon Schafheitle, Isabelle Wildhaber & Gabriel Kasper - 2019 - Journal of Business Ethics 160 (2):377-392.
    Organizations increasingly rely on algorithm-based HR decision-making to monitor their employees. This trend is reinforced by the technology industry claiming that its decision-making tools are efficient and objective, downplaying their potential biases. In our manuscript, we identify an important challenge arising from the efficiency-driven logic of algorithm-based HR decision-making, namely that it may shift the delicate balance between employees’ personal integrity and compliance more in the direction of compliance. We suggest that critical data literacy, ethical awareness, the use of participatory (...)
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  • Surveying rape.Alexandra Rutherford - 2017 - History of the Human Sciences 30 (4):100-123.
    College campus-based surveys of sexual assault in the United States have generated one of the most high-profile and contentious figures in the history of social science: the ‘1 in 5’ statistic. Referring to the number of women who have experienced either attempted or completed sexual assault since their time in college, ‘1 in 5’ has done significant work in making the prevalence of this experience legible to the public and to policy-makers. Here I examine how sexual assault surveys have participated (...)
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