Wednesday, 16 November 2022 at 16:00-17:30 Zoom

A presentation by Jason Burton (PhD, Assistant Professor at the Department of Digitalization, Copenhagen Business School) and Mari-Klara Stein (PhD, Professor at the Department of Business Administration of TalTech).

The people who comprise an organization’s workforce are conventionally referred to as human resources. While the term human resources was originally introduced to emphasize the value of human beings as an asset in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, the label’s connotation has evolved over time, with some arguing it evokes an outdated view of labor as a commodity. In turn, many organizations have rebranded human resources with terms like people and culture or employee experience. What does this linguistic shift tell us about the state of human resources, and what might it foreshadow for the digital workplace? In this paper, we present an exploratory analysis of the Google Books Ngram Corpus in which we map the rise and fall of human resource-related terminology from 1900-2019. We show how the prevalence of different terms associate with various workplace trends and propose a computational methodology for studying the semantics of human resources as it relates to said trends. Such study may lend new insights as to how technological developments and path-altering events (e.g., the COVID-19 pandemic) change the way we view the workforce.

Jason Burton is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Digitalization of Copenhagen Business School. His research uses computational methods to study human behavior in the context of a digital society. This involves topics ranging from how people fundamentally reason with information and make decisions, to how the structure of online information environments influences the beliefs people form, to how online environments can be (re)designed to promote collective intelligence. Jason holds a PhD in Psychology from Birkbeck, University of London and an MSc in Organizational Psychiatry & Psychology from King’s College London.

Seminar on inglise keeles. The seminar is in English.