'Responsible innovators or ideation brokers': an analysis of the political and moral work of technology-based anti-slavery organizations

The topic of anti-slavery is not a common subject of research in organization studies and there is limited attention to how managers, founders and entrepreneurs who are active in this organizational field, use digital technologies to tackle the problems of modern slavery. In this study, the analysis centres on how technology-based anti-slavery organizations ‘take on’ and distribute discourses about human rights and the indignity of unfree labour in their business models and solutions. Specifically, the study examines how ‘discursive spaces’ are constructed as anti-slavery organizations reach out to certain target groups to disrupt the market conditions that enables enslavement or trafficking to persist. The findings show how discursive spaces embody normative values and rhetorics concerning human rights and unfree labour - values and rhetorics which lead to the creation of contradictory repertoires related to sustainability, transparency, solidarity and responsibility.