What algorithms cannot manage: Understanding and promoting human dignity in algorithmic management

Software algorithms are increasingly used by organisations to make decisions that were once handled by Human Resource Management professionals, such as hiring, performance, pay, and career development. This shift, known as Algorithmic Management, has spread across many types of organisations and HR tasks. While critics have raised concerns about these systems treating workers as data points rather than people, the underlying ethical and philosophical notion of human dignity had received surprisingly little systematic attention when this research began in
2020.

With the overall impact ambition to help promote and protect human dignity in (future) algorithmic management practices, the overarching research question asks: How can human dignity in a context with algorithmic management be understood and meaningfully promoted through the design, situated use, and study of these systems in practice?

To answer this, the research develops three frameworks. The first provides a methodological approach, namely Conceptual Modelling as a scientific Methodology (CMM), which formalises conceptual model construction as a scientific practice suited to impact-driven research, enabling integration of philosophical and social science insights toward the study’s impact goals. Second, Human dignity is theorised through
the Capability Approach, which frames capability development, the expansion of freedoms and opportunities workers themselves value, as the central pathway to dignity in algorithmic management contexts. Third, Mode E, a heuristic grounded in feminist theory, attends to the ethics of the knowledge-production process itself, ensuring that research activities remain dignity-consistent throughout.

The fieldwork is conducted in a Dutch organisation supporting people with employment support needs that was piloting an algorithmic, game-based assessment tool to evaluate employees’ talents. Over two years of intermittent fieldwork, using multiple methods such as dialogue and observation, we engaged in co-learning to understand how the tool was experienced and how it impacted dignity in practice.