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This paper aims to analyze 54 People Analytics (PA) conferences with a view to mapping the discussions around PA, industries/sectors that currently lead in PA practices and PA opinion makers.

A scoping approach was adopted to examine the emerging topic of PA. This is one of the first methodological attempts to analyze a number of business/management conferences together.

The findings illustrate a broad geography of existing PA knowledge hubs and the relative PA maturity of organizations from some sectors. Within organizations, discussion on PA takes place at the top levels. The results also indicate a growing interest in and readiness to embrace PA on the part of the professional community and enthusiasm among some management academics about making PA the center of the HR profession. The findings reveal the most frequently discussed conference topics, and those that are currently overlooked in extant published work, guaranteeing future research and practice.

To the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first methodological attempt to analyze numerous PA-related business/management conferences together.

This research aims to explore whether or how organizations adopt people analytics (PA), its value and potential socio-technical factors that can enable or hinder PA projects by disrupting and reshaping human resource management. We do this by focusing on the Italian context.

We conduct a scoping review of data collected between 2018 and 2022 via Google Alerts (GA), a content change detection and notification service that is gaining popularity in scholarly research.

Our findings suggest that the diffusion of PA applications in Italy, especially those of a descriptive nature, is growing. Most of the existing PA applications are positioned in a positive technocratic light, envisioning the value of PA for both employees and organizations. The value for the latter appears to be direct, while the value for employees is realized through organizational initiatives. The findings also suggest that while enablers can vary between PA application types, the barriers, especially technological and environmental, are generic for both descriptive and predictive/prescriptive PA applications.

Theoretically, we propose a framework for analyzing PA applications, their values, enablers and barriers. Methodologically, we present and describe in detail a novel approach, drawing on GA that can be used to study PA in specific contexts. Practically, our study serves as a helpful point of reference for managers planning or implementing PA in Italy, for benchmarking PA in Italy over time and for comparative international studies.

COVID-19 has been a big reset to human resource (HR) processes. Organizations’ HR functions around the world have been working hard to effect a response that falls under four main headings: jobs and work continuity; physical health and well-being; need for mental health, resilience, family support and dealing with uncertainty; and remote work. Knowledge of whether and how these responses have been adopted by health organizations or their potential impact is scarce.

This paper discusses some of the HR strategies adopted or recommended for adoption by health systems/organizations with specific reference to the aforementioned HR response categories.

The evidence available illustrates that the HR responses adopted by health organizations are mostly in line with those adopted by organizations from other sectors, though not without some variances. The findings also suggest that COVID has acted as a “technological catalyst” for HR practices in health organizations.

The background readings that informed this study also helped to identify some literature gaps that could be addressed by future research and practice.

The state of the art presented in this paper may be of value to health leaders and health HR managers in further strengthening their responses to both pre-existing and post-COVID people-related challenges.

This work is timely considering existing literature gaps and the fact that the existing evidence gets outdated quickly as the emergency progresses.

This research analyzed the existing academic and grey literature concerning the technologies and practices of people analytics (PA), to understand how ethical considerations are being discussed by researchers, industry experts and practitioners, and to identify gaps, priorities and recommendations for ethical practice.

An iterative “scoping review” method was used to capture and synthesize relevant academic and grey literature. This is suited to emerging areas of innovation where formal research lags behind evidence from professional or technical sources.

Although the grey literature contains a growing stream of publications aimed at helping PA practitioners to “be ethical,” overall, research on ethical issues in PA is still at an early stage. Optimistic and technocentric perspectives dominate the PA discourse, although key themes seen in the wider literature on digital/data ethics are also evident. Risks and recommendations for PA projects concerned transparency and diverse stakeholder inclusion, respecting privacy rights, fair and proportionate use of data, fostering a systemic culture of ethical practice, delivering benefits for employees, including ethical outcomes in business models, ensuring legal compliance and using ethical charters.

This research adds to current debates over the future of work and employment in a digitized, algorithm-driven society.

The research provides an accessible summary of the risks, opportunities, trade-offs and regulatory issues for PA, as well as a framework for integrating ethical strategies and practices.

By using a scoping methodology to surface and analyze diverse literatures, this study fills a gap in existing knowledge on ethical aspects of PA. The findings can inform future academic research, organizations using or considering PA products, professional associations developing relevant guidelines and policymakers adapting regulations. It is also timely, given the increase in digital monitoring of employees working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Digital transformation projects are complex, lengthy and difficult to implement, often failing to meet their objectives. Previous research has attributed this failure to competing institutional logics influencing actors’ coping responses, and differences in actors’ interpretations of the project’s goals, technology and processes - their “organising vision”. The purpose of this paper is to analyse a complex technology implementation project from an institutional perspective, to further elucidate the role of multiple logics and organising vision.

A qualitative single study approach was used to investigate a public-sector technology project aimed at delivering a unified Human resource information system (HRIS) across regional health organisations in one country.

Four logics characterised the project (public sector, professional, corporate and market), but their relative dominance shifted as the project transitioned through stages, from comprehension to implementation. These shifts exposed tensions between components of actors’ organising vision, which influenced their coping behaviours in response to unexpected changes in the project’s strategic ambitions and technological scope. Coherence of vision, both within groups of actors and between them, was a key mediator of coping responses and project outcomes.

This analysis demonstrates the role of actors’ organising vision in bridging institutional logics and coping responses to shape digital transformation projects. It highlights the need to account not only for diverse institutional logics, but also for their changing influence as projects unfold and actors’ attention is directed onto different aspects of the organising vision. From a management perspective, it illustrates the importance of clear and consistent communication, to avoid entrenching conflicting interpretations.