The Correlation Machine: Digital governance and governing the digital? - Prof. Lucas Introna
Channel: Digital Organisation and Society Research Centre
Date: 2020-07-01

In the Second of DOS Distinguished Speaker Series, Prof. Lucas Introna, Lancaster University discusses his ongoing stream of research and conceptual work exploring digital governance. In this presentation Prof. Introna explores digital governance as a new form of governance that aims to govern effects based on correlations. He argues that this form of governance is a dramatically different form of governance that effectively hides the political and ethical and acts to displace or defer problems deemed unsolvable in some form.  He illustrates this mode of governance using work on governing academic writing through plagiarism detection systems and considers the way machine learning is being used to govern a variety of problems such as recruitment and policing. He further shows what digital governance does, ethically and politically, and why it is necessary for society to be critical of these practices. He raises some questions about how we might respond to these digital governing practices, individually and collectively.   

About the speaker:
Prof. Introna is professor of organisation, technology, and ethics at Lancaster University. His research interest is the entanglement of the social and the technical, especially with regard to the ethics and politics implicated in such entanglements. He is co-editor of Ethics and Information Technology. He has published on a variety of topics such as sociomateriality (Organisation Studies), algorithms (Theory, Culture & Society; Science, Technology & Human Values), governmentality (Organisation Studies), ethics (Theory, Culture & Society), philosophy of technology (Philosophy in the Contemporary World), information and power (Management, Information & Power, Palgrave 1997), privacy (Journal of Business Ethics) and surveillance (Surveillance & Society). He teaches courses in ethics, reflective practice, and organisational change management.