Owning Ethics Corporate Logics, Silicon Valley, and the Institutionalization of Ethics

In response to a cycle of ethical and political crises, Silicon Valley technology companies have begun placing significant resources into "ethics" initiatives, including assigning executive-level staff to coordinate product design practices and review policies across their organizations. T...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social research Vol. 86; no. 2; pp. 449 - 476
Main Authors: Metcalf, Jacob, Moss, Emanuel, boyd, danah
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: New York Johns Hopkins University Press 01.07.2019
Subjects:
Acquaintances
Artificial intelligence
Business ethics
Charisma
Clicks
Companies
Convictions
Disclosure
Discourses
Engineering
Ethics
Ethnography
Evangelism
Everyday life
Failure
Financial disclosure
Hedges
Hiring
Human resources
Human rights
Institutionalization
International law
Interviews
Job titles
Jumping
Liability
Owners
Power
Procedural justice
Race
Respondents
Scholarship
Seriousness
Social research
Social responsibility
Software
Success
Talking
Technology
Tests
Universal Declaration of Human Rights
Values
United States > US
Silicon Valley-California
ISSN:0037-783X, 1944-768X, 1944-768X
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:In response to a cycle of ethical and political crises, Silicon Valley technology companies have begun placing significant resources into "ethics" initiatives, including assigning executive-level staff to coordinate product design practices and review policies across their organizations. These new "ethics owners" are tasked with responding to external challenges to the core logics of Silicon Valley that fuel its outsized power over individuals and society—meritocracy, technological solutionism, and market fundamentalism—by producing "ethics" practices that remain largely bounded by those logics. "Doing ethics" in tech companies consists of working through this tension.
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ISSN:0037-783X
1944-768X
1944-768X
DOI:10.1353/sor.2019.0022