When Technology Becomes an Ideological Battleground: How Data Ideology affects Affordance Actualization in People Analytics

Datafication technologies increasingly impact today’s workplaces, as employees’ behavioral data are collected and analyzed for organizational purposes. While datafication technologies can increase organizational efficiency, they come with the risk of employee surveillance and discrimination. As a result, their implementation is surrounded by controversy. Understanding the different perceptions and assumptions about these technologies from individuals with diverse functional roles is crucial to successfully implementing datafication technologies. Based on 43 interviews, we first investigated how individuals with different functional roles evaluate people analytics, as a manifestation of datafication technologies, using the well-known lens of affordances. Inconclusive results led us to explore further and investigate whether and how perceptions of datafication technologies, as well as affordance actualization, can be explained by data ideologies. Our findings from a critical realist analysis offer novel theoretical and empirical insights into the concept of data ideologies. Data ideologies offer a useful extension to the affordance theory and help explain the relationship between varied stakeholders and datafication technologies along three mechanisms: moderation, confirmation, and modulation. The theorized mechanisms have implications for deploying datafication technologies in practice.