Organization Development and the Robotic-Cybernetic-Human Workforce: Humanistic Values for a Posthuman Future (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
What are the best practices for leading a workforce in which human employees have merged cognitively and physically with electronic information systems and work alongside social robots, artificial life-forms, and self-aware networks that are ‘colleagues’ rather than simply ‘tools’? How does one manage organizational structures and activities that span both actual and virtual worlds? How are the forces of technological posthumanization transforming the theory and practice of management? This volume explores the reality that an organization’s workers, managers, customers, and other stakeholders increasingly comprise a complex network of human agents, artificial agents, and hybrid human-synthetic entities. The first part of the book develops the theoretical foundations of an emerging ‘organizational posthumanism’ and presents conceptual frameworks for understanding and managing the evolving workplace relationship between human and synthetic beings. Subsequent chapters investigate concrete management topics such as the likelihood that social robots might utilize charismatic authority to inspire and lead human workers; potential roles of AIs as managers of cross-cultural virtual teams; the ethics and legality of entrusting organizational decision-making to spatially diffuse robots that have no discernible identity or physical form; quantitative approaches to comparing the managerial capabilities of human and artificial agents; the creation of artificial life-forms that function as autonomous enterprises which evolve by competing against human businesses; neural implants as gateways that allow their human users to participate in new forms of organizational life; and the implications of advanced neuroprosthetics for information security and business model design. As the first comprehensive application of posthumanist methodologies to the field of management, this volume will be of use to scholars and students of contemporary management and to management practitioners who must increasingly understand and guide the forces of technologization that are rapidly reshaping organizations’ form, dynamics, and societal roles.
Posthuman Management: Creating Effective Organizations in an Age of Social Robotics, Ubiquitous AI, Human Augmentation, and Virtual Worlds (Second Edition), 2016
We live in an era of accelerating technological posthumanization in which the form and capacities of human and artificial agents are converging in ways that might be understood as either exciting or unsettling. Ongoing developments in fields like biocybernetics, neuroprosthetics, wearable computing, virtual reality, and genetic engineering are yielding technologically augmented human beings who possess physical components and behaviors resembling those traditionally found in electronic computers. Meanwhile, developments in artificial intelligence, social robotics, artificial life, nanotechnology, and ubiquitous computing are creating synthetic entities whose structures and processes ever more closely resemble those of living organisms. Such human and nonhuman agents exist and interact within increasingly sophisticated digital-physical ecosystems in which entities shift continually be-tween actual and virtual worlds. Insofar as such agents constitute the building-blocks of contemporary organizations, the processes of technological posthumanization that are transforming them are also reshaping the theory and practice of organizational management. Posthuman Management provides a wide-ranging and systematic investigation of these issues by collecting relevant texts recently published in academic journals along with original content prepared for this volume. This introductory chapter to Posthuman Management presents an overview of the major issues explored within the volume’s three parts and the methodologies employed. In Part I of the book, a general theoretical and practical framework for the field of posthuman management is developed. Each chapter approaches this task at a different level, moving from the more abstract sphere of a basic exploration of the nature of posthumanism to the more concrete sphere of formulating tools for posthumanized business analysis and considering the implications of posthumanization for a specific management discipline (in this case, organization development). The three chapters in Part II take a closer look at look at the ways in which organizational management will be affected by the posthumanizing augmentation of human beings through technologies such as neuroprosthetics, virtual reality, and genetic engineering. Finally, the six chapters of Part III explore in more depth the ways in which increasingly advanced technologies for robotics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life will impact organizational management.
Sapient Circuits and Digitalized Flesh: The Organization as Locus of Technological Posthumanization (second edition), 2018
Building on existing forms of critical, cultural, biopolitical, and sociopolitical posthumanism, in this text a new framework is developed for understanding and guiding the forces of technologization and posthumanization that are reshaping contemporary organizations. This ‘organizational posthumanism’ is an approach to analyzing, creating, and managing organizations that employs a post-dualistic and post-anthropocentric perspective and which recognizes that emerging technologies will increasingly transform the kinds of members, structures, systems, processes, physical and virtual spaces, and external ecosystems that are available for organizations to utilize. It is argued that this posthumanizing technologization of organizations will especially be driven by developments in three areas: 1) technologies for human augmentation and enhancement, including many forms of neuroprosthetics and genetic engineering; 2) technologies for synthetic agency, including robotics, artificial intelligence, and artificial life; and 3) technologies for digital-physical ecosystems and networks that create the environments within which and infrastructure through which human and artificial agents will interact. Drawing on a typology of contemporary posthumanism, organizational posthumanism is shown to be a hybrid form of posthumanism that combines both analytic, synthetic, theoretical, and practical elements. Like analytic forms of posthumanism, organizational posthumanism recognizes the extent to which posthumanization has already transformed businesses and other organizations; it thus occupies itself with understanding organizations as they exist today and developing strategies and best practices for responding to the forces of posthumanization. On the other hand, like synthetic forms of posthumanism, organizational posthumanism anticipates the fact that intensifying and accelerating processes of posthumanization will create future realities quite different from those seen today; it thus attempts to develop conceptual schemas to account for such potential developments, both as a means of expanding our theoretical knowledge of organizations and of enhancing the ability of contemporary organizational stakeholders to conduct strategic planning for a radically posthumanized long-term future.
2018
Key organizational decisions made by sapient AIs. The pressure to undergo neuroprosthetic augmentation in order to compete with genetically enhanced coworkers. A corporate headquarters that exists only in cyberspace as a persistent virtual world. A project team whose members interact socially as online avatars without knowing or caring whether fellow team members are human beings or robots. Futurologists’ visions of the dawning age of ‘posthumanized’ organizations range from the disquieting to the exhilarating. Which of these visions are compatible with our best current understanding of the capacities and the limits of human intelligence, physiology, and sociality? And what can posthumanist thought reveal about the forces of technologization that are transforming how we collaborate with one another – and with ever more sophisticated artificial agents and systems – to achieve shared goals? This book develops new insights into the evolving nature of intelligent agency and collaboration by applying the post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic methodologies of posthumanism to the fields of organizational theory and management. Building on a comprehensive typology of posthumanism, an emerging ‘organizational posthumanism’ is described which makes sense of the dynamics of technological posthumanization that are reshaping the members, personnel structures, information systems, processes, physical and virtual spaces, and external environments available to organizations. Conceptual frameworks and analytical tools are formulated for use in diagnosing and guiding the ongoing convergence in the capacities of human and artificial actors that is being spurred by novel technologies relating to human augmentation, synthetic agency, and digital-physical ecosystems. As the first systematic investigation of these topics, this text will be of interest to scholars and students of posthumanism and management and to management practitioners who must grapple on a daily basis with the forces of technologization that are increasingly powerful drivers of organizational change.
Sapient Circuits and Digitalized Flesh: The Organization as Locus of Technological Posthumanization (second edition), 2018
In this text we present the Posthuman Management Matrix, a model for understanding the ways in which organizations of the future will be affected by the blurring – or even dissolution – of boundaries between human beings and computers. In this model, an organization’s employees and consumers can include two different kinds of agents (human and artificial) who may possess either of two sets of characteristics (anthropic or computer-like); the model thus defines four types of possible entities. For millennia, the only type of relevance for management theory and practice was that of human agents who possess anthropic characteristics – i.e., ‘natural human beings.’ During the 20th Century, the arrival of computers and industrial robots made relevant a second type: that of artificial agents possessing computer-like characteristics. Management theory and practice have traditionally overlooked the remaining two types of possible entities – human agents possessing computer-like physical and cognitive characteristics (which can be referred to as ‘cyborgs’) and artificial agents possessing anthropic physical and cognitive characteristics (which for lack of a more appropriate term might be called ‘bioroids’) – because such agents did not yet exist to serve as employees or consumers for organizations. However, in this text we argue that ongoing developments in neuroprosthetics, genetic engineering, virtual reality, robotics, and artificial intelligence are indeed giving rise to such types of agents and that new spheres of management theory and practice will be needed to allow organizations to understand the operational, legal, and ethical issues that arise as their pools of potential workers and customers evolve to include human beings whose bodies and minds incorporate ever more computerized elements and artificial entities that increasingly resemble biological beings. By analyzing the full spectrum of human, computerized, and hybrid entities that will constitute future organizations, the Posthuman Management Matrix highlights ways in which established disciplines such as cybernetics, systems theory, organizational design, and enterprise architecture can work alongside new disciplines like psychological engineering, AI resource management, metapsychology, and exoeconomics to help organizations anticipate and adapt to posthumanizing technological and social change.
A Phenomenological Analysis of the Posthumanized Future Workplace
Kwartalnik Nauk o Przedsiębiorstwie, 2018
Increasingly, organizations are becoming “technologically posthumanized” through the integration of social robots, AI, virtual reality, and ubiquitous computing into the workplace. Here a phenomenological approach is used to anticipate architectural transformations of the workplace resulting from posthumanization’s challenge to traditional anthropocentric paradigms of the workplace as a space that exists at “human” scale, possesses a trifold boundary, and serves as a spatiotemporal filter.
Frontiers in Psychology
The new managerial challenges are related to finding solutions for complex problems, inside some more and more complex management systems, in a continuously changing organizational context. Competitivity and progress imply a continuous positive change and the need to accept, respond, and adapt to the organization’s internal and external environments changes. This brief research report aims to point out the organizational ergonomics’ contribution to employees’ wellbeing through a systemic, emotional, and spiritual approach to man’s interaction with technology, systems, and organizational environment. The research methods used were the multidisciplinary bibliographic study and the interview. Three semi-structured interviews were taken to explore today’s challenges and new 4.0 technologies’ impact, especially robots, on the company and on employees’ wellbeing and spiritual fulfillment. The novelty comes from the analysis of new technologies’ impact on the human factor from the spiritua...
Journal of Business Research, 2020
Artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly being adopted by organizations, yet implementation is often carried out without careful consideration of the employees who will be working along with it. If employees do not understand or work with AI, it is unlikely to bring value to an organization. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the ways in which employees and AI can collaborate to build different levels of sociotechnical capital. Accordingly, we develop a model of AI integration based on Socio-Technical Systems (STS) theory that combines AI novelty and scope dimensions. We take an organizational socialization approach to build an understanding of the process of integrating AI into the organization. Our framework underscores the importance of AI socialization as a core process in successfully integrating AI systems and employees. We conclude with a future research agenda that highlights the cognitive, relational, and structural implications of integrating AI and employees.
The Liberating Effect of AI in Organizations
Advances in economics, business and management research, 2022
In the evolving landscape of organizational dynamics, AI emerges not as a usurper of human roles, but as a liberator, unshackling the human workforce from the confines of monotonous and mechanized tasks. This paper delves into a nuanced exploration of the harmonious coexistence of AI and human ingenuity, positing that AI's takeover of routine tasks paves the way for enhanced human contribution in organizations. We meticulously examine three cardinal domains of unassailable human predominance: the richness of human experience, intricate tapestry of intersubjective relations, and profound depths of symbolism and identity. Each domain was dissected, illustrating the irreplaceable nature of human touch and the ensuing enrichment of organizational culture and performance. In conclusion, we propose a counternarrative to the dystopian discourse of AI as a displacer of the human workforce. We assert that AI, in its mechanized precision, liberates human creativity and innovation, fostering an environment in which human potential is not subjugated but is unleashed, accentuated, and celebrated. We argue that this infusion of human essence will redefine organizational success and innovation, making them not just technologically advanced but also richly humanized, creative, and value-centric.