Friend or foe? Higher education administration and the globalizing business ethics of artificial intelligence

• In Event: Virtual Roundtable Session 1
  In Refereed Roundtable Session: Artificial Intelligence: Insights into Changes in Higher Education

Proposal

A proliferating number of studies has been criticizing higher education institutions for an ongoing corporatization, claiming that this phenomenon has diminished the unique institutional character of educational organizations (McCartney & Metcalfe, 2018; Blum & Ulman, 2012). Nonetheless, a critical scrutinization of trends in business management scholarship and practice can benefit educational leadership scholars and practitioners alike, when carefully using such material as foundations for crafting adapted versions of existing solutions in the industry, or highlighting them as erroneous actions for avoidance when developing new directions (Smith & Riley, 2010). This approach becomes especially useful when dealing with novel advancements, whose treatment cannot benefit from existing knowledge bases and policy frameworks, yet they require interorganizational and international treatment. Artificial intelligence (AI) constitutes such an example. It has emerged as a crucial technological force that has already demonstrated the potential of ongoingly revolutionizing diverse business activities and operational functions, extending from marketing and entrepreneurship to operational management and customer support, among other (Oueslati & Ayari, 2024). AI appears to be growing faster than regulators and lawmakers can react to it (Cannarsa, 2021), rendering individual organizations and the leaders representing them, as moral authority figures, expected to make decisions that prioritize the well-being of their operations but also their wide spectrum of stakeholders (Anshari et al., 2023). The main goal of this presentation is to highlight central trends in more recent business literature pieces pertaining to the globalizing propensities of corporate AI ethics, and to discuss their significance for higher education leaders seeking effective approaches to ethical AI administration. This goal is achieved through an integrated literature review of 65 academic articles in the field of business studies, and the subsequent theorization of their relevance and potential reconfiguration for higher education administration. The applicable trends are clustered in three main categories that will be separately examined in the three parts of the main body of the presentation. The first part explores the conceptualization and operationalization of co-operative solutions to ethical challenges raised by the use and development of AI systems, coupled with the need for innovative and internationally executed knowledge management approaches. The second part provides an expanded model of global social responsibility and the inclusion of responsive ethical automation for the formation of novel organizational digital responsibility paradigms. The third and final part underlines the importance of thinking beyond intellectual property, which seems to have monopolized the AI ethical debates in educational management, with an emphasis on the global labor market and novel challenges in the transnational moral economy.

Author

• Christos Orfanidis, OISE - University of Toronto