Justifying employee gatekeeping: A video-elicitation and comparative study on resolving the moral unease of hiring
通过对比企业（23人）与文化领域（17人）的招聘人员，研究发现把关者普遍存在道德不安，且企业领域更严重；连接主义逻辑成为主要辩护机制，将候选人筛选转变为“忏悔测试”。
Hiring is an act of evaluation that comes with much organizational and social responsibility, making it a morally sensitive situation. The way employee gatekeepers come to terms with their selections presents itself as an exemplary case to study the moral dimension of organizational life. Relying on a pragmatist perspective and an economies of worth framework, this article uncovers how employers experience moral uncertainty and justify their choices. Through a comparison of gatekeeping in two employment fields, this study covers new ground on how decision logics and regimes of valuation play out and can be structurally conditioned. Through in-depth interviews, combined with a ranking exercise based on video-elicitation, with recruiters and hiring managers from the corporate (n: 23) and cultural (n: 17) fields in the Netherlands, this paper explores how evaluation processes and selections are justified. The interviews show that a sense of moral unease is common among gatekeepers, but much more prevalent among corporate rather than cultural gatekeepers. Larger organizational size, high market pressure and lower supply of candidates does not translate into moral sterility for corporate gatekeepers. Second, the study reveals that a connexionist logic enters as a powerful justificatory regime, transforming candidate selection procedures into test of confession.