Lina Dencik Co-Authors Paper on Data-Driven Hiring Systems

In a new paper for New Media & Society, CMDS Fellow Lina Dencik and co-author Sanne Stevens analyze interviews with providers of data-driven hiring systems and find that their legitimization frames extend to ways in which work and workers should be organized and assessed. 

The paper points out that the ideological grounds of datafication have been well-established: data-driven knowledge production is seen as less biased, more objective and offering superior insights than other forms of information gathering.

Yet in the interviews with providers of data-driven hiring systems the authors find that the providers rely upon justifications that are not merely oriented towards profit but also invoke values of how work and workers should be organized and assessed. They see these as part of a process of establishing new “tests,” understood as procedures that seek to legitimize capitalism. These, in turn, have implications for how problems and solutions are approached in relation to hiring and, moreover, what it means to be qualified for a job.