Of crowds and talents: discursive constructions of global online labour

Post-COVID-19 ethics of people analytics

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the importance of the ethical investigation of the emerging practice of people analytics (PA) within human resource (HR) management through charting the development of PA before during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is designed as a short review of the current thinking in the ethics of PA, a practical journey through the progression of PA across the pandemic and a theoretical exploration of PA through three lenses: virtue ethics, critical social theory and actor network theory.

Findings

The authors suggest that PA raises novel ethical issues in terms of personal impact, increased penetration into working and home lives and the punch delivered in terms of organisational and behavioural change.

Research limitations/implications

This study provides a short review of three theoretical approaches to PA. Detailed research and reflection is required to develop and extend an ethics of PA. While engagement with the ethics of PA requires gaining an understanding of the discipline, ideas and jargon of HR management, it is essential that ethicists engage with PA as HR departments take on greater influence and adopt executive roles.

Practical implications

PA is now at the top of the HR management agenda, but there is limited understanding of the technology, the ethics and the new responsibilities it brings for HR management. This paper raises the profile of an ethical agenda, which practitioners should engage with.

Social implications

The ethical consequences of PA have social implications as work practices change and hybrid working becomes prevalent. It has the potential to change the relationship between home and the workplace.

Originality/value

This paper provides a unique synthesis of theory and practice in a new area of ethical importance.

Emerging trends in digital transformation: a bibliometric analysis

Purpose

Ubiquitous digital technologies are driving organisations to embrace non-traditional digitally transformed business models incessantly. Heterogeneous literature contributions have resulted in a spur in the research related to business transformation driven by digital technologies in recent years; consequently, the research under the digital transformation (DT), even though becoming a hotspot, remains very fragmented. The authors endeavour to holistically present the literature's intellectual structure under DT as a concept, its evolving journey and the emerging research streams in the business and management domains using the techniques of bibliometric analysis.

Design/methodology/approach

By performing bibliometric analysis on 234 research articles published over the last 20 years in the DT domain, retrieved from Thompson Reuters Web of Science TM, this study culls out thorough insights from the citation, co-citation and keyword analysis. Further emerging research streams were evaluated using VOSviewer software.

Findings

The study depicts an overall incremental trend of year-on-year publications, authors' performance, publication journals, associated institutions and research driving countries, along with key insights from co-citation network analysis. Furthermore, the study evaluates four research areas – organisational impacts, applied applications and insights, operational processes and social aspects, comprising eighteen research streams that comprehensively cover-up research under the DT domain.

Research limitations/implications

The study contributes to the literature of DT by amalgamating the status of the present research, but more importantly, by deriving the research areas and research streams, which can be further expanded by researchers as future research streams.

Practical implications

For the practitioners, the study aims to act as a ready reckoner repository with practice-oriented literature references to facilitate them building knowledge and taking effective strategic decisions to harness the benefits of DT more proficiently.

Originality/value

This study illustrates the bibliometric structure of the DT literature and presents insights from the growth of the literature year-on-year.