Seminar – When justice is blind to algorithms: Institutional blackboxing of algorithmic decision making and its consequences

Professor Magnus Mähring, Stockholm School of Economics

Recent research has addressed the downsides of algorithmic decision making (ADM), showcasing how it can threaten social justice by, eg, producing biased and discriminatory outcomes. We address the potential threats to social justice that emanate from, but also go beyond, algorithms per se, extending to how public-service and legal institutions (fail to) respond to the consequences of ADM. Drawing on a case study of the use of an ADM system in a public school administration, we explore the practices through which public institutions avoided engagement with unjust consequences of ADM, thus (re)producing injustice. We provide a conceptual model outlining how three ignoring practices can socially and institutionally blackbox an ADM system and engender both social and legal injustice. Our work paves the way for interdisciplinary research on social and institutional blackboxing of ADM. We also extend algorithmic injustice to the legal arena and provide practical implications for legislation and legal systems.

Speaker bio

Magnus Mähring is the Erling Persson Professor of Entrepreneurship and Digital Innovation at the Stockholm School of Economics. He is currently Head of the Department of Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology and the SSE House of Innovation, Co-director of the Swedish Center for Digital Innovation, and Fellow at Cambridge Digital Innovation (Hughes Hall and Cambridge Judge Business School). His research focuses on organisational transformation processes involving digital technologies. He has published in a range of journals including MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research, Organization Studies, Information & Organization, Human Relations and California Management Review. He has also served in editorial roles for Information Systems Journal, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, and MIS Quarterly, and currently serves at associate editor for Information Systems Research.

For more information, please contact Luke Slater.