Emmanouil Gkeredakis

Modern organizations face growing institutional and competitive pressures to adopt artificial intelligence for predictive data science and to generate knowledge from vast digital datasets. While artificial intelligence adoption promises new insights, it also engenders hidden capability traps, risking the conflation of reality with algorithmic representations and the neglect of non-digital or analogue dimensions of organizational life. This article introduces the concept of epistemic stance—the underlying approach and orientation to generating knowledge in organizations—to critically examine the organizational implications of predictive data science. It unpacks the components and promises of a data science epistemic stance, highlights its epistemic risks, and explains its appeal to modern organizations. The article argues that organizations can strengthen their knowledge capabilities by combining multiple epistemic stances through carefully designed sociotechnical systems.

In the complex realm of ethical decision making, organizations are increasingly developing comprehensive ethical frameworks as guides. These frameworks prescribe ethical principles and decision-making processes to steer organizational actors toward addressing the elusive question of “what is the right thing to do?” in specific situations. However, the interplay between these prescriptive frameworks and collective processes of ethical sensemaking remains underexplored. Based on an extensive qualitative study within publicly funded healthcare organizations, we examine how organizational actors, confronted with the challenge of making exceptional funding decisions, enact an organizational ethical framework. Our findings reveal the manifold ways through which such a framework both streamlines ethical sensemaking and induces new and unexpected interpretive challenges. These challenges generate ethical equivocality, which decision makers seek to reduce through particular sensegiving interventions, and, on occasion, through problematizing the abstract principles prescribed by the framework, based on what is intuitively felt right in situ. We contribute to the literature by developing a conceptual model of three distinct modes in which organizational actors enact the prescriptions of an ethical framework. Our article sheds new light on the unintended consequences of using organizational ethical frameworks in real-world ethical deliberations.