Dylan E. Wittkower

Care and Loyalty in the Workplace

There is significant debate in business ethics regarding the place of loyalty and gratitude in business relations. While most accounts of loyalty—both of employers to employees and of employees to employers—suppose that duties of loyalty are ultimately grounded in contractual agreements, our view is that these relationships are also personal and develop elements of friendship that involve emotional bonds. Although relationships of employment begin as contractual and maintain that character as long as the contract endures, such relations are interpersonal as well as contractual, and for this dimension of the relationship, the ethics of care can give important guidance in understanding the moral nature of the relationship and obligations that flow from it. Our aim in this chapter is to argue that the approach that care theorists take toward personal relationships—which involves emphasizing the importance of personal relationships, sustaining connections with others, and using highly contextual reasoning to make moral decisions—also applies to the personal relationships developed between employers and employees. On this view, it is virtuous to replicate relationships of care, empathy, and concern for others in the workplace, especially when employers and employees maintain more intimate and personal relationships.

On The Origins of The Cute as a Dominant Aesthetic Category in Digital Culture

In theories of media prior to the digital age, it was imagined that a liberated or socialized media would result in a proliferation of communications for, of, and by the people. It would be possible for media to emerge directly from their publics, and to represent those publics in their fundamental or foundational values and projects. Many theorists, including John Dewey (1927), Hans Enzensberger (1970), and Ivan lllich (1973), gave grounds to expect the general availability of mass communications to be a boon for humanist politics, either democratic or socialist.

Principles of anti-discriminatory design

Technical design can produce exclusionary and even discriminatory effects for users. A lack of discriminatory intent is insufficient to avoid discriminatory design, since implicit assumptions about users rarely include all relevant user demographics, and in some cases, designing for all relevant users is actually impossible. To minimize discriminatory effects of technical design, an actively anti-discriminatory design perspective must be adopted. This article provides examples of discriminatory user exclusion, then defining exclusionary design in terms of disaffordances and dysaffordances. Once these definitions are in place, principles of anti-discriminatory design are advanced, drawing upon a method of phenomenological variation employed in the context of standpoint epistemology.

Economies of the Internet

The papers in this issue of First Monday were originally presented as a series of panels at the Association of Internet Researchers 2015 conference in Phoenix, Arizona. This short introduction explains the impetus behind the organization of these panels — which was to document diversity in approaches to the study of Internet economies — and briefly introduces each paper by locating them in the nexus between political economy and cultural studies.

Method against method: swarm and interdisciplinary research methodology

Part of a special issue on ‘swarm methodology,’ this paper, written by a swarm participant, reflects upon the purpose and value of this kind of interdisciplinary research methodology. First, by way of a recognition of the interdisciplinary status of this paper itself, the question of what we hope to accomplish when we engage in conversations across disciplinary boundaries is broached. Second, a discussion of the practice of peer-review provides an approximate view of one paradigmatic understanding of how we produce a ‘conversation’ within a given established research methodology. We are then, third, able to consider a number of possible related ways in which we might understand the value of a conversation between research methodologies. Finally, the common intuition that there is a concrete value specifically within a ‘holistic’ or ‘synergistic approach’ is addressed, and the swarm methodology put forth as a likely place for such a value to emerge, if it is to emerge anywhere.