• von Pape Thilo

We often think of the private as the opposite of the public or professional. But privacy has its place in organizations and in the workplace, and for good reason: workers' privacy is critical to their well-being, but also to their professional performance. Indeed, privacy theory recognizes that corporations and institutions have a right to privacy in their own organizational name. But while the right to privacy of citizens and consumers is, in principle, undisputed, privacy in public and professional life is a more opaque issue.

The goal of this seminar is to improve our understanding of privacy in the context of work: what role do psychological, physical, informational, and other forms of privacy play for employees, employers, organizations, and clients? How can we regulate privacy in the physical and digital spaces and processes of contemporary organizations? We will begin to answer these questions by working together through some basic theories about the dimensions, functions, and regulation of privacy and applying them to the work context. You will then divide into small groups and choose a current area of concern for privacy and develop existing studies on this area into a presentation for the class. These areas of concern include 1) algorithmic surveillance of workers, 2) emotional labor in the platform economy, 3) work-related self-presentation in social media, and 4) privacy turbulence under conditions of remote work. In the third part of the semester, we will build on these experiences to conduct our own small-scale studies of privacy in 21st-century work.

At the end of the seminar, you will have the opportunity to write a seminar paper (6 ECTS points).

More information on the moodle page of the course: Moodle

By the end of the semester, you will be able to

• Distinguish dimensions of privacy in contemporary work
• Appreciate the benefits of privacy and empowerment for all stakeholders involved
• Identify affordances and constraints for privacy regulation in digital work environments and processes
• Design and apply research to inform privacy-related decisions in the context of business communication.

- Trepte, S., & Reinecke, L. (Eds.). (2011). Privacy online: Perspectives on privacy and self-disclosure in the social web. Springer Science & Business Media.

- Sannon, S., Stoll, B., DiFranzo, D., Jung, M. F., & Bazarova, N. N. (2020). “I just shared your responses” Extending Communication Privacy Management Theory to Interactions with Conversational Agents. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 4(GROUP), 1-18. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3027063.3053246

Further references will be presented in the first session.

Seminar with continuous evaluation: after the registration period, you can no longer cancel your registration (see session calendar on the Faculty's website).

Enrollment for the seminar paper must be done separately: enroll on MyUnifr for the seminar work under "Course enrollment".