Session 2 - Fall 2022 will take place on Wednesday, 4:00 PM CET 19 October 2022, on Zoom Meeting
About The Series
The CIVICA Data Science Seminar series is a unique multi-disciplinary series focused on applications and methodologies of data science for the social, political, and economic world.
Session 2 Details
On Wednesday 19 October 2022 at 4PM CET, Dr. Marco Meyer, University of Hamburg will present on the topic of organisational ethics using computational methods, focusing on the issues of epistemic vices and how they can shape an organisation's misconduct.
Organizational epistemic virtues and vices shape how concerned an organization and its members are about the quality of the information that they circulate. Epistemically virtuous organizations are better at generating, sharing, and storing knowledge than epistemically vicious organizations. Complementing case studies suggesting that organizational epistemic vice may drive corporate misbehavior, we take a quantitative approach to test the hypothesis whether differences in epistemic virtue and vice explain differences in corporate misconduct. Analyzing online employee reviews of 810 US companies between 2010 and 2020 across a broad range of sectors, we assess organizational virtue and vice from the perspective of employees. To score corporations on epistemic virtue and vice, we train a natural language processing algorithm to classify whether reviews attribute epistemic virtues or vices to their employer. The model classifies correctly whether a sentence refers to epistemic virtue or vice in nine of ten cases in our test dataset. Moreover, the model correctly identifies the most relevant epistemic virtue or vice in eight of ten cases. These results suggest that epistemic virtues and vices of organizations can be measured based in an unobtrusive way, by reprocessing employee feedback. We further find that if employees attribute less epistemic virtue and more epistemic vice to a company, this company is likely to be engaged in more instances of misbehavior. Hence epistemic virtue and vice are an important factor in explaining the frequency of corporate misbehavior.
Seminar Speaker
Dr. Marco Meyer
Dr. Marco Meyer is the principal investigator of a research group at the University of Hamburg investigating what organizations have a duty to know, and which qualities help them to fulfill these duties. He has made contributions to the ethics of finance, business ethics, and applied epistemology. He holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Groningen.
Agenda
Welcome Introduction Dr. Olga Gasparyan, Hertie School
Setting the scene: Brief intro to the speaker and his talk
Seminar Session Dr. Marco Meyer
Does Epistemic Vice Explain Corporate Misconduct?
Research Discussion. Lead Institution
Q&A / Discussion on the research
Announcement
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