Technological mediation, mediating morality and moral imaginaries of design: Performance measurement systems in the pharmaceutical industry
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, we seek to understand the ethics of accounting technology design. We commence by working with the concept of technological mediation, which is theorizing how technologies steer actions by evoking given behaviours and by contributing to perceptions and interpretations of reality that form the basis for choices and decisions to act. As such, this relation between people and technologies has important ethical consequences since it implies that technologies contribute actively to how humans do ethics. In this paper, we draw upon a postphenomenological approach (Ihde; Verbeek) to study and to theorise the moral mediations brought about by accounting technology, by examining how, in its design , technology can actively mediate the moral choices and guide the moral actions human beings make. Our central research question is ‘how is morality mediated in the design of accounting technologies?‘. This question is explored through an ethnographic study of the design of a new Performance Measurement and Compensation System in the Italian division of a multi-national pharmaceutical company. We offer two main contributions towards answering this question. First, by working within the theory of technological mediation, we develop the concept of a ‘moral imaginary’ as an approach to understanding designing the morality of things. Second, we elaborate a process model to theorise how moral mediations unfold in the design of accounting technology. From our conceptual motivation and the theoretical elaboration it inspired, we illuminate how the design of accounting technologies, in this case a PMS system, is a form of ‘engineering ethics’ through techno-moral mediation.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it