Ethically Intelligent? A Framework for Exploring Human Resource Management Challenges of Intelligent Working Environments

Abstract

With advances in the development of intelligent environments (IEs) social scientists and ethicists have begun to gauge the social impact of the diverse emerging technology assemblages and to work with developers and stakeholders in order to improve design and deployment of such technologies. Research conducted to better understand specific socio-technical settings faces multiple challenges due to the complexity of most scenarios, making it imperative to approach the attempt of understanding IEs both from multi-disciplinary perspectives and to include practitioners and managers of IEs. In this paper we introduce our framework for setting up a competence center (CC) for defining and managing socio-ethical challenges of intelligent working environments (IWEs). We detail practical steps to successfully build a CC in order to allow other research projects to adopt some of these steps or the whole framework to positively anticipate and manage socioethical challenges of IWEs. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.