AI in medical diagnosis: AI prediction & human judgment

AI has long been regarded as a panacea for decision-making and many other aspects of knowledge work; as something that will help humans get rid of their shortcomings. We believe that AI can be a useful asset to support decision-makers, but not that it should replace decision-makers. Decision-making uses algorithmic analysis, but it is not solely algorithmic analysis; it also involves other factors, many of which are very human, such as creativity, intuition, emotions, feelings, and value judgments. We have conducted semi-structured open-ended research interviews with 17 dermatologists to understand what they expect from an AI application to deliver to medical diagnosis. We have found four aggregate dimensions along which the thinking of dermatologists can be described: the ways in which our participants chose to interact with AI, responsibility, 'explainability', and the new way of thinking (mindset) needed for working with AI. We believe that our findings will help physicians who might consider using AI in their diagnosis to understand how to use AI beneficially. It will also be useful for AI vendors in improving their understanding of how medics want to use AI in diagnosis. Further research will be needed to examine if our findings have relevance in the wider medical field and beyond.

Trust, individualism, and the logics of care in middle America during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

Polarization and turf-wars have characterized the COVID-19 response in the United States. While COVID-19 narratives can be binary and divisive, how people cared for each other throughout the first year of the pandemic is more nuanced. This article describes how and why constructs of fear, individualism, wellbeing, and personal risk-taking became imbued in behaviors that thwarted the risk of the collective. This work is based on informal conversations, public forums, and 86 in-depth interviews during the 2020 summer in a small tourist town in northwest Iowa. Some believed engaging in public health prevention was not their responsibility and instead privileged their personal enjoyment, finances, or mental health over others, de-emphasizing personal risk and stating God will protect them. Others were deeply committed to public health prevention, by staying home, masking, and social distancing. In both cases, people used shame to promote their views (e.g., shame on you for masking/unmasking!) as well as fear (e.g., I do/don't fear coronavirus because I am virtuous). However, most engaged in logics of care, navigating what public health precautions to follow to protect themselves and those they loved most. Yet, such decisions were navigated through a culture of individualism and ideals of personal responsibility that cultivated a mistrust in public health. Understanding how and why such individualism took hold in American publics is a crucial inflection point for policy-making as well as cultural interpretation of why and how people construct risk and responsibility.

Framing the virus: The political, economic, biomedical and social understandings of the COVID-19 in Taiwan

The purpose of this paper is to study how people use texts and languages to interpret or make sense of the COVID-19 pandemic. We draw on the theoretical literature of framing perspectives to formulate our arguments that consider the virus a socially constructed reality. We use Taiwan as an empirical case study, using topic modeling analysis of newspaper articles. Our findings show that the language of the COVID-19 coverage combines the four frames of political evaluation, economic impact, biomedical science and social life in varying proportions. These frames are subject to changes in pandemic conditions. Implications for theory and practice are presented.

Reconstructing authenticity through a multi-paradigmatic umbrella: A process perspective

While there is a substantive body of research that recognizes the importance of authentic leadership theory, critiques have challenged its dominant and positive-focused conceptualization. We synthesize these extant critiques, providing researchers with an integrative understanding of the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical deficiencies facing authenticity in a leadership context.

These deficiencies have thwarted authentic leadership’s development limiting our understanding of what authentic leadership is and who authentic leaders are. Synthesizing what has been said about authentic leadership demonstrates why authenticity needs to be conceived of and studied differently. We offer being-in-becoming as a multi-paradigmatic umbrella which accommodates different ontological foundations of what it means to be authentic. A being-in -becoming approach recognizes that authenticity emanates from a developmental process, suggesting the study of authenticity must also be thought of processually. Studying authenticity as a developmental process holds important theoretical and practical implications as it embraces the processual nature of our dynamic, evolutionary beings.

Sensing: The elephant in the room of management learning

This conceptual paper examines reasons why analytically educated learners may be reluctant to engage in sensory-based learning. Sensing is indispensable for constructing knowledge and should be employed on par with the intellect, particularly in today’s complex and uncertain context. Yet, we have observed learners’ reluctance to engage with sensing and attempted to understand the reasons for it. Our theoretical contribution illuminates the underlying causes of this phenomenon, thus furthering the study of sensing in the fields of individual learning and management learning. Our practical contribution prompts researchers, learners, educators, and managers to think more systematically about ways to overcome this reluctance and openly bring sensing into management learning practice on par with intellectual processing. With the help of phenomenal theorizing, the presented exploratory study identifies the following common barriers to sensory-based learning for analytically educated learners: corporate social norms against sensory-based evidence, discomfort of learning outside of one’s comfort zone, inadequate vocabulary for sensory experiences, lack of sensory awareness, preference for sequential reasoning, mistrust in sensory-based evidence, dismissive attitude, and denying (or not admitting to) the use of sensing.

Unleading during a pandemic: Scrutinising leadership and its impact in a state of exception

Characterising COVID-19 pandemic as a ‘state of exception’, we might expect great hero models of leadership to come to the fore. Instead, drawing on a thematic analysis of 246 news articles, this paper illustrates something different: communities, companies, individuals picked-up the leadership mantle but were reluctant to frame their practices under a leadership rhetoric. The paper explores spontaneous initiatives and leaderly actions that were made visible during the pandemic and proposes practice-based implications for redrawing leadership conceptualisations. These practices, coined as unleading, are characterised under four dimensions: unconditionality and social intention; purposeful action in the absence of an achievement motivation; sensing and attending to local conditions; and confident connecting and collaborating. The analysis and discussion of the four dimensions affirm that while leading and unleading are always present when organising, they are more or less visible and practiced depending on organisational, social and individual circumstances. The paper concludes by surfacing questions and reflections for the future of unleading and implications for leadership theorising and practice.