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Purpose: Regulatory changes in the United States introduced over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids with the goal of increasing the accessibility and affordability of hearing healthcare. These changes represent a shift away from the provision of hearing aids by licensed providers. In this study, we evaluated the relative importance of values across service delivery models, and the extent to which OTC hearing aids represents a values shift.Method: We performed a qualitative content analysis of two document categories: critique documents that motivated the creation of OTC hearing aids, and regulatory documents that defined OTC hearing aids. Team members coded portions of text for the values they expressed. In total, 29,235 words were coded across 72 pages in four documents. Rank-order analyses were performed to determine the prioritization of values within each category of documents and subsequently compare values between OTC and traditional audiology documents. Results: The rank order of values was not significantly correlated, but critique and regulatory documents both prioritized values related to reducing barriers to hearing aid access and use. Differences in the rank order of values in the OTC documents compared to traditional audiology were consistent with a values shift.Conclusions: Relative to traditional audiology, the OTC documents highly prioritized access to care and cost, and deprioritized subjective and objective benefit. This research demonstrates a need to establish the values of hearing healthcare service delivery through a consensus of stakeholders, including individuals from diverse backgrounds who were underserved by the traditional model.

Lessons from the recent past.

The design of new technologies is a cooperative task (between designers on teams, and between designers and users) with ethical import. Studying technology development teams' engagement with the ethical aspects of their work is important, but engagement with ethical issues is an unobservable construct without agreement on what observable factors comprise it. Ethical sensitivity (ES), a construct studied in medicine, accounting, and other professions, offers a framework of observable factors by operationalizing ethical engagement in workplaces into component parts. However, ES has primarily been studied as a property of individuals rather than groups and in professions outside of computing. This paper uses a corpus of 108 ES studies from 1985-2020 to adapt the framework for studies of technology design teams. From the ES corpus, we build an umbrella framework that conceptualizes ES as comprising the moment of noticing an ethical problem (recognition), the process of building understanding of the situation (particularization), and the decision about what to do (judgment). This framework makes theoretical and methodological contributions to the study of how ethics are operationalized on design teams. We find that ethical sensitivity provides useful language for studies of collaboration and communication around ethics; suggests opportunities for, and evaluations of, ethical interventions for design workplaces; and connects team members' backgrounds, educational experiences, work practices, and organizational factors to design decisions. Simultaneously, existing research in HCI and CSCW addresses the limited range of research methods currently employed in the ES literature, adding rich, contextualized data about situated and embodied ethical practice to the theory.

There is growing consensus that teaching computer ethics is important, but there is little consensus on how to do so. One unmet challenge is increasing the capacity of computing students to make decisions about the ethical challenges embedded in their technical work. This paper reports on the design, testing, and evaluation of an educational simulation to meet this challenge. The privacy by design simulation enables more relevant and effective computer ethics education by letting students experience and make decisions about common ethical challenges encountered in real-world work environments. This paper describes the process of incorporating empirical observations of ethical questions in computing into an online simulation and an in-person board game. We employed the Values at Play framework to transform empirical observations of design into a playable educational experience. First, we conducted qualitative research to discover when and how values levers—practices that encourage values discussions during technology development—occur during the design of new mobile applications. We then translated these findings into gameplay elements, including the goals, roles, and elements of surprise incorporated into a simulation. We ran the online simulation in five undergraduate computer and information science classes. Based on this experience, we created a more accessible board game, which we tested in two undergraduate classes and two professional workshops. We evaluated the effectiveness of both the online simulation and the board game using two methods: a pre/post-test of moral sensitivity based on the Defining Issues Test, and a questionnaire evaluating student experience. We found that converting real-world ethical challenges into a playable simulation increased student’s reported interest in ethical issues in technology, and that students identified the role-playing activity as relevant to their technical coursework. This demonstrates that roleplaying can emphasize ethical decision-making as a relevant component of technical work.

The 2012 Menlo Report was an effort in which a group of computer scientists, US government funders, and lawyers produced ethics guidelines for research in information and communications technology (ICT). Here we study Menlo as a case of what we call ethics governance in the making, finding that this process examines past controversies and enrols existing networks to connect the everyday practice of ethics with ethics as a form of governance. To create the Menlo Report, authors and funders relied on bricolage work with existing, available resources, which significantly shaped both the report’s contents and impacts. Report authors were motivated by both forward- and backward-looking goals: enabling new data-sharing as well as addressing past controversies and their implications for the field’s body of research. Authors also grappled with uncertainty about which ethical frameworks were appropriate and made the decision to classify much network data as human subjects data. Finally, the Menlo Report authors attempted to enrol multiple existing networks in governance through appeals to local research communities as well as taking steps towards federal rulemaking. The Menlo Report serves as a case study in how to study ethics governance in the making: with attention to resources, adaptation, and bricolage, and with a focus on both the uncertainties the process tries to repair, as well as the new uncertainties the process uncovers, which will become the site of future ethics work.

While the ethics of technology is analyzed across disciplines from science and technology studies (STS), engineering, computer science, critical management studies, and law, less attention is paid to the role that firms and managers play in the design, development, and dissemination of technology across communities and within their firm. Although firms play an important role in the development of technology, and make associated value judgments around its use, it remains open how we should understand the contours of what firms owe society as the rate of technological development accelerates. We focus here on digital technologies: devices that rely on rapidly accelerating digital sensing, storage, and transmission capabilities to intervene in human processes. This symposium focuses on how firms should engage ethical choices in developing and deploying these technologies. In this introduction, we, first, identify themes the symposium articles share and discuss how the set of articles illuminate diverse facets of the intersection of technology and business ethics. Second, we use these themes to explore what business ethics offers to the study of technology and, third, what technology studies offers to the field of business ethics. Each field brings expertise that, together, improves our understanding of the ethical implications of technology. Finally we introduce each of the five papers, suggest future research directions, and interpret their implications for business ethics.

Research using online datasets from social media platforms continues to grow in prominence, but recent research suggests that platform users are sometimes uncomfortable with the ways their posts and content are used in research studies. While previous research has suggested that a variety of contextual variables may influence this discomfort, such factors have yet to be isolated and compared. In this article, we present results from a factorial vignette survey of American Facebook users. Findings reveal that researcher domain, content type, purpose of data use, and awareness of data collection all impact respondents’ comfort—measured via judgments of acceptability and concern—with diverse data uses. We provide guidance to researchers and ethics review boards about the ways that user reactions to research uses of their data can serve as a cue for identifying sensitive data types and uses.

Recent public discussions about technologies and social values have called for greater consideration of ethics during technology development and deployment, leading many organizations to create and promote compliance- or checklist-oriented toolkits and frameworks to address values and ethical issues. However, surfacing discussion and consideration of ethics in broader, more open-ended ways during the design process may help surface unique needs, social corner cases, or new or different understandings of values and ethics. This one-day workshop will convene CSCW researchers and practitioners to propose and consider new interventions and approaches to ethics in design that go beyond formal checklist- and compliance-oriented approaches. CSCW's rich set of methods when investigating values and ethics provides a starting point for developing new approaches and interventions. These may potentially include design activities, games and roleplaying, critical making, changes to work practice and organizational structure, or conducting empirical research. Our goal is to explore multiple and alternative forms of values and ethics interventions, rather than coming to a particular 'best' approach. This workshop aims to map out a space of interventions for values and ethics, propose new approaches and interventions, and craft an agenda for experimenting with and evaluating new interventions.

Internet protocol development is a social process, and resulting protocols are shaped by their developers’ politics and values. This article argues that the work of protocol development (and more broadly, infrastructure design) poses barriers to developers’ reflection upon values and politics in protocol design. A participant observation of a team developing internet protocols revealed that difficulties defining the stakeholders in an infrastructure and tensions between local and global viewpoints both complicated values reflection. Further, Internet architects tended to equate a core value of interoperability with values neutrality. The article describes how particular work practices within infrastructure development overcame these challenges by engaging developers in praxis: situated, lived experience of the social nature of technology.

Mobile application design can have a tremendous impact on consumer privacy. But how do mobile developers learn what constitutes privacy? We analyze discussions about privacy on two major developer forums: one for iOS and one for Android. We find that the different platforms produce markedly different definitions of privacy. For iOS developers, Apple is a gatekeeper, controlling market access. The meaning of “privacy” shifts as developers try to interpret Apple’s policy guidance. For Android developers, Google is one data-collecting adversary among many. Privacy becomes a set of defensive features through which developers respond to a data-driven economy’s unequal distribution of power. By focusing on the development cultures arising from each platform, we highlight the power differentials inherent in “privacy by design” approaches, illustrating the role of platforms not only as intermediaries for privacy-sensitive content but also as regulators who help define what privacy is and how it works.

Data from networked sensors, such as those in our phones, are increasingly being explored and used to identify behaviors related to health and mental health. While computer scientists have referred to this field as context sensing, personal sensing, or mobile sensing, medicine has more recently adopted the term digital phenotyping. This paper discusses the implications of these labels in light of privacy concerns, arguing language that is transparent and meaningful to the people whose data we are acquiring.

BackgroundThe growing field of personal sensing harnesses sensor data collected from individuals’ smartphones to understand their behaviors and experiences. Such data could be a powerful tool within mental health care. However, it is important to note that the nature of these data differs from the information usually available to, or discussed with, health care professionals. To design digital mental health tools that are acceptable to users, understanding how personal sensing data can be used and shared is critical. ObjectiveThis study aimed to investigate individuals’ perspectives about sharing different types of sensor data beyond the research context, specifically with doctors, electronic health record (EHR) systems, and family members. MethodsA questionnaire assessed participants’ comfort with sharing six types of sensed data: physical activity, mood, sleep, communication logs, location, and social activity. Participants were asked about their comfort with sharing these data with three different recipients: doctors, EHR systems, and family members. A series of principal component analyses (one for each data recipient) was performed to identify clusters of sensor data types according to participants’ comfort with sharing them. Relationships between recipients and sensor clusters were then explored using generalized estimating equation logistic regression models. ResultsA total of 211 participants completed the questionnaire. The majority were female (171/211, 81.0%), and the mean age was 38 years (SD 10.32). Principal component analyses consistently identified two clusters of sensed data across the three data recipients: “health information,” including sleep, mood, and physical activity, and “personal data,” including communication logs, location, and social activity. Overall, participants were significantly more comfortable sharing any type of sensed data with their doctor than with the EHR system or family members (P

Users increasingly use mobile devices to engage in social activity and commerce, enabling new forms of data collection by firms and marketers. User privacy expectations for these new forms of data collection remain unclear. A particularly difficult challenge is meeting expectations for contextual integrity, as user privacy expectations vary depending upon data type collected and context of use. This article illustrates how fine-grained, contextual privacy expectations can be measured. It presents findings from a factorial vignette survey that measured the impact of diverse real-world contexts e.g., medical, navigation, music, data types, and data uses on user privacy expectations. Results demonstrate that individuals’ general privacy preferences are of limited significance for predicting their privacy judgments in specific scenarios. Instead, the results present a nuanced portrait of the relative importance of particular contextual factors and information uses, and demonstrate how those contextual factors can be found and measured. The results also suggest that current common activities of mobile application companies, such as harvesting and reusing location data, images, and contact lists, do not meet users’ privacy expectations. Understanding how user privacy expectations vary according to context, data types, and data uses highlights areas requiring stricter privacy protections by governments and industry.

What are the best ways for design teams attend to issues of power, inequity, trust and other ethical concerns as they arise in design? Literature on value-sensitive design (VSD) and technology ethics has advocated for a range of design methods that propose different roles and responsibility for ethics during technology development. This paper explores four provocations that imagine different roles and responsibilities for moral and ethical reasoning on design teams: participatory design (in which diverse stakeholders may represent their own values in the design process), values advocates (introducing experts to lead values discussions or conduct ethics interventions), embedding values discussions within design and encouraging ‘moral exemplars’ within design. Each of these posits different logistical arrangements as well as different levels of expertise in ethical practice. The paper uses examples from the VSD and computer ethics literatures as well as the authors’ ethnographic work to explore the advantages, challenges and consequences of each approach. RESEARCH HIGHLIGHTS (i) Analysis of the ethical and practical impact of contrasting value-sensitive design models. (ii) Discussion of the responsibility of users, ethicists, social scientists and technologists for design ethics.

BACKGROUND The growing field of personal sensing harnesses sensor data collected from individuals’ smartphones to understand their behaviors and experiences. Such data could be a powerful tool within mental health care. However, it is important to note that the nature of these data differs from the information usually available to, or discussed with, health care professionals. To design digital mental health tools that are acceptable to users, understanding how personal sensing data can be used and shared is critical. OBJECTIVE This study aimed to investigate individuals’ perspectives about sharing different types of sensor data beyond the research context, specifically with doctors, electronic health record (EHR) systems, and family members. METHODS A questionnaire assessed participants’ comfort with sharing six types of sensed data: physical activity, mood, sleep, communication logs, location, and social activity. Participants were asked about their comfort with sharing these data with three different recipients: doctors, EHR systems, and family members. A series of principal component analyses (one for each data recipient) was performed to identify clusters of sensor data types according to participants’ comfort with sharing them. Relationships between recipients and sensor clusters were then explored using generalized estimating equation logistic regression models. RESULTS A total of 211 participants completed the questionnaire. The majority were female (171/211, 81.0%), and the mean age was 38 years (SD 10.32). Principal component analyses consistently identified two clusters of sensed data across the three data recipients: “health information,” including sleep, mood, and physical activity, and “personal data,” including communication logs, location, and social activity. Overall, participants were significantly more comfortable sharing any type of sensed data with their doctor than with the EHR system or family members (P CONCLUSIONS The comfort level in sharing sensed data was dependent on both data type and recipient, but not individual characteristics. Given the identified differences in comfort with sensed data sharing, contextual factors of data type and recipient appear to be critically important as we design systems that harness sensor data for mental health treatment and support.

Two dominant theoretical models for privacy-individual privacy preferences and context-dependent definitions of privacy-are often studied separately in information systems research. This paper unites these theories by examining how individual privacy preferences impact context-dependent privacy expectations. The paper theorizes that experience provides a bridge between individuals' general privacy attitudes and nuanced contextual factors. This leads to the hypothesis that, when making judgments about privacy expectations, individuals with less experience in a context rely more on individual preferences such as their generalized privacy beliefs, whereas individuals with more experience in a context are influenced by contextual factors and norms. To test this hypothesis, 1,925 American users of mobile applications made judgments about whether varied real-world scenarios involving data collection and use met their privacy expectations. Analysis of the data suggests that experience using mobile applications did moderate the effect of individual preferences and contextual factors on privacy judgments. Experience changed the equation respondents used to assess whether data collection and use scenarios met their privacy expectations. Discovering the bridge between 2 dominant theoretical models enables future privacy research to consider both personal and contextual variables by taking differences in experience into account.

Mobile consumer devices are increasingly used as personal sensing instruments, where users record their daily habits, track their physical activity, or monitor their health. Research is underway to extend today's diversity of vendor-designed "walled garden" repositories, ultimately repositioning individuals as producers, consumers, and remixers of a vast openly shared public data set. By empowering people to easily measure, report, and compare their own personal environments, such tools transform everyday citizens into reporting agents who uncover and visualize unseen elements of their own everyday experiences. With this important new shift in mobile device usage - from a communication tool to a ubiquitous "experience sharing instrument" - comes a new dimension in trust and privacy challenges. Today's privacy and trust tools that address web surfing and simple location-based services already struggle to be adopted in practice. We argue that in order to prepare for tomorrow's sensor sharing, privacy and trust must be addressed holistically, incorporating both technical approaches and actual sharing behavior. This article summarizes the results of a five-day Dagstuhl Seminar on mobile experience sharing and outlines future research necessary in this domain.

Funding for Open Access provided by the UMD Libraries Open Access Publishing Fund., In citizen science, volunteers collect and share data with researchers, other volunteers, and the public at large. Data shared in citizen science includes information on volunteer location or other sensitive personal information; yet, volunteers do not typically express privacy concerns. This study uses the framework of contextual integrity to understand privacy accounting in the context of citizen science, by analyzing contextual variables including roles; information types; data flows and transmission principles; and, uses, norms, and values. Findings show that uses, norms, and values—including core values shared by researchers and public volunteers, and the motivations of individual volunteers—have a significant impact on privacy accounting. Overall, citizen science volunteers and practitioners share and promote openness and data sharing over protecting privacy. Studying the context of citizen science offers an example of contextually-appropriate data sharing that can inform broader questions about research ethics in an age of pervasive data. Based on these findings, this paper offers implications for designing data and information flows and supporting technologies in public and voluntary data sharing projects.

Author(s): Shilton, Katie; Burke, Jeffrey A; Claffy, KC; Zhang, Lixia | Abstract: Considering the social impact of a proposed future Internet architecture.

Although billions of dollars are spent each year securing network infrastructure, devices, and resources against threats, the impact of cybersecurity arrangements on individuals remains largely unexamined. Unless cybersecurity technologies, policies, and processes are built with people, and their diversity, in mind, the needs of wide swaths of society—including children and teens, the elderly, women, low-income families, and people with disabilities—are unlikely to be addressed. Though many methods are important for investigating motivations, practices, and affect, qualitative methods are particularly necessary for nuanced ways of knowing about these phenomena. But qualitative research constitutes just a fraction of cybersecurity research. This fishbowl session will focus on research to enable usable, livable, and inclusive cybersecurity by exploring qualitative ways of knowing in cybersecurity research.

Privacy is a critical challenge for the mobile application ecosystem. US policy approaches to mobile data protection rely on privacy by design: encouraging developers to proactively implement privacy features to protect sensitive data. But we know little about how application developers define privacy, how they decide to implement privacy features, and what motivates them to consider privacy as a primary design value. This project investigates the discussion of privacy as a professional practice within a community of mobile application developers. Analyzing posts on an iOS forum reveals that privacy is a frequent topic of conversation in this community. This paper describes how iOS developers define and legitimate privacy, and reveals a challenge: iOS developers rely heavily on a definition of privacy provided by Apple which does not reflect current empirical or theoretical understandings of how users understand privacy. Understanding this challenge can help us shape better guidelines for privacy by design, and broach challenges to the widespread adoption of privacy by design principles.

As information systems transform our world, computer scientists design affordances that influence the uses and impacts of these technological objects. This article describes how the practices of design affect the social values materialized in emerging technologies, and explores how design practices can encourage ethical reflection and action. The article presents an ethnography of a laboratory that engineered software for mobile phones to track users’ locations, habits, and behaviors. This technical work raised a number of ethical challenges, particularly around questions of data use and surveillance. The ethnography suggests that particular activities within laboratories can help engineers agree on social values as important to design. It characterizes these activities as values levers: practices that open new conversations about social values and encourage consensus around those values as design criteria. Laboratory leaders and advocates can enable and strengthen these levers to encourage ethical reflection and action as an explicit part of design practice.

Researchers have begun exploring techniques to promote social values within the technology design process. Increasingly, such projects include interventions: action research that inserts social scientists into design to promote values of interest. This article evaluates interventions to promote privacy and anti-surveillance values in a ubiquitous computing laboratory. Data from two years of participant observation suggest how interventions by outside social scientists, mentors and colleagues, clients and research subjects, and institutional authorities increase designers' ability to foreground, react to, and incorporate privacy and anti-surveillance ethics into design. The article also suggests criteria by which social science researchers can evaluate the success of a values in design intervention, including 1) moving the values advocate from outsider to insider; 2) changing the topic of conversation; 3) making values considerations a positive, rather than negative, part of design work; and 4) materializing new values in resulting technologies. Though the project features a difficult-to-replicate blend of personalities and situations, analysis of the structures that enabled successful interventions can be useful to researchers concerned with values in design.

They place calls, surf the Internet, and there are close to 4 billion of them in the world. Their built-in microphones, cameras, and location awareness can collect images, sound, and GPS data. Beyond chatting and texting, these features could make phones ubiquitous, familiar tools for quantifying personal patterns and habits. They could also be platforms for thousands to document a neighborhood, gather evidence to make a case, or study mobility and health. This data could help you understand your daily carbon footprint, exposure to air pollution, exercise habits, and frequency of interactions with family and friends.

The technical details of Internet architecture affect social debates about privacy and autonomy, intellectual property, cybersecurity, and the basic performance and reliability of Internet services. This paper explores one method for practicing anticipatory ethics in order to understand how a new infrastructure for the Internet might impact these social debates. This paper systematically examines values expressed by an Internet architecture engineering team-the Named Data Networking project-based on data gathered from publications and internal documents. Networking engineers making technical choices also weigh non-technical values when working on Internet infrastructure. Analysis of the team's documents reveals both values invoked in response to technical constraints and possibilities, such as efficiency and dynamism, as well as values, including privacy, security and anonymity, which stem from a concern for personal liberties. More peripheral communitarian values espoused by the engineers include democratization and trust. The paper considers the contextual and social origins of these values, and then uses them as a method of practicing anticipatory ethics: considering the impact such priorities may have on a future Internet.

Corporations, governments, and individuals can increasingly collect new forms of personal data using pervasive technologies such as mobile tablets and phones. These always-on, always-present devices carried by billions can capture and transmit users’ location, images, motion, and user input. Mobile technologies could become a platform to document community needs and advocate for civic change, to understand personal habits and routines, or to document health problems and manage chronic illness. Simultaneously, new forms of data collection software utilize techniques traditionally employed by tools of surveillance: granular data gathering, sophisticated modeling, and inferences about a personal behavior and attributes. There is a shifting and permeable boundary between data collection for individual or social goals, and corporate or government surveillance. This boundary invokes social values in design: the features, principles, or ethics we collectively value in the design of data collection technologies. Because technology regulation is often years behind the rate of innovation, this question is often answered, consciously or un-, by engineering teams. This dissertation studies an influential engineering laboratory working in participatory sensing, a form of personal data collection utilizing pervasive mobile devices. The dissertation employs ethnographic methods to examine design practices and agents that promote social values, and particularly anti-surveillance values – privacy, equity, consent, and forgetting – in design. The multi-year study of sensing development reveals how such abstract social values were built into concrete technological features. Anti-surveillance values became material as the design team built consensus around values such as privacy, consent, equity, and forgetting; and then translated those values into technological features. This process was enabled by values levers: practices that opened new conversations about social values, and encouraged consensus around those values as design criteria. While literature on values in design has previously suggested that values help construct the day-to-day work of design, my dissertation illustrates that the opposite is also true: the routinized practices of design work shape the values incorporated into new technologies. If anti-surveillance values such as privacy, consent, equity and forgetting are to be materialized in the design of pervasive sensing technologies, laboratories must be structured to encourage values levers, which facilitate and bolster the process of building values into technology.

It has become cliche to observe that new information technologies endanger privacy. Typically, the threat is viewed as coming from Big Brother (the government) or Company Man (the firm). But for a nascent data practice we call "self-surveillance," the threat may actually come from ourselves. Using various existing and emerging technologies, such as GPS-enabled smartphones, we are beginning to measure ourselves in granular detail - how long we sleep, where we drive, what we breathe, what we eat, how we spend our time. And we are storing these data casually, perhaps promiscuously, somewhere in the "cloud," and giving third-parties broad access. This data practice of self-surveillance will decrease information privacy in troubling ways. To counter this trend, we recommend the creation of the Privacy Data Guardian, a new profession that manages Privacy Data Vaults, which are repositories for self-surveillance data. In Part I, we describe the emerging data practice of self-surveillance, which has been enabled by various new measurement and communication technologies. We explain how self-surveillance can produce substantial benefits to both the individual and society, in both intrinsic and instrumental terms. Unfortunately, such benefits may never be achieved without substantial privacy costs. Part II makes threshold clarifications about those privacy costs. It proffers two different metrics by which privacy might be measured and explains why the rise of self-surveillance will entail the net loss of privacy under either metric. We also point out that the problem of self-surveillance (our surveilling us) is, fortunately, more tractable than related privacy problems, such as third-party surveillance of us and our surveillance of third-parties. Having cleared this brush, we turn to our central proposal - the creation of the Personal Data Guardian, a professional whose job it is to maintain a client’s self-surveillance data in a Personal Data Vault. In addition to providing technical specifications of this approach, we outline the specific legal relations, which include a fiduciary relationship, between client and Guardian. In addition, we recommend the creation of an evidentiary privilege, similar to a trade secret privilege, that protects self-surveillance data held by a licensed Guardian. Finally, Part IV answers objections that our solution is implausible or useless. We conclude by pointing out that various legal, technological, and self-regulatory attempts at safeguarding privacy from new digital, interconnected technologies have not been particularly successful. Before self-surveillance becomes a widespread practice, some new innovation is needed. In our view, that innovation is a new "species," the Personal Data Guardian, created through a fusion of law and technology and released into the current information ecosystem.

The original “Tools for Humanists” report (Nguyen and Shilton 2008) evaluated more than 30 digital tools designed for use by the humanities community. The report focused on the success of these tools not as measured by metrics of effectiveness or performance, but rather by the accessibility of tools. The report defined accessibility broadly. Could users easily discover, recognize, and begin to use tools built by U.S. Digital Humanities Centers (DHCs) and intended for digital humanists?

Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Knowledge Management edited by David J. Pauleen. Westport, CT and London: Libraries Unlimited, 2007. 259 pp. ISBN 1-59158-331-4. Knowledge management (KM), an emerging field of research garnering significant attention both within and outside of Information Studies (IS), is a disciplinary borderland. KM draws upon understandings of information structures and information seeking culled from IS research in the name of business management. The field focuses on solutions for understanding, controlling, and preserving that elusive business asset: knowledge. Because knowledge is a theoretical good with complicated practical implications, understanding knowledge management requires mixing concepts of cultural and social theory with practice-oriented approaches. David Pauleen has compiled a book of essays which successfully navigates this mixed territory, integrating theory and practice while drawing attention to overlooked issues of cultural diversity in knowledge management. Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Knowledge Management is an engaging blend of theories of culture and its relationship to knowledge, analyses of cultural barriers to successful knowledge management in business and research environments, and case studies in knowledge management across cultural borders. The volume’s convincing argument is that knowledge production, dissemination, transfer, and organization are all reliant upon socially-constructed cultures: local, organizational, and national. Therefore, managers who wish to foster successful knowledge management projects—whether cross-disciplinary research or improved business practices in a multi-national corporation—cannot afford to ignore the multitude of cultures within their organizations. The anthology begins with two contrasting articles that develop complex and sensitive (although quite different) definitions of “culture,” one of the most difficult parts of writing a book on such a topic. David Pauleen et al.’s “Exploring the Relationship between National and Organizational Culture, and Knowledge Management” provides the most nuanced definition of culture, setting the tone for the rest of the volume. The authors focus on national cultures without ignoring or obscuring the importance of regional and ethnic cultures to KM. They argue that all cultures produce tacit epistemologies or theories of knowledge, which then affect cultural cognitive processes. Because of these cultural ways of knowing, KM systems must take into account the knowledge communities that will be involved. Peter Murphy’s contrasting “The Art of Systems: The Cognitive-Aesthetic Culture of Portal Cities and the Development of Meta-Cultural Advanced Knowledge Economies” views culture as reliant upon the design and aesthetics among which people live, particularly the “pattern thinking” which emerges from the aesthetic forms of the city (p. 35). The author argues that the culture of city