Publications

This paper is concerned with the character of accountability in the context of emerging technologies. What happens to accountability when people are increasingly entangled with artificial intelligence processes? That is, instead of entering into a relationship with some other where one reports; is subject to interrogation and may suffer consequences, accountability will increasingly involve infrastructures defined by detection of patterns in people’s ‘data exhaust’ followed by automated consequences. Employing an object-oriented ontology perspective on the accountability forum, I examine the ways in which tools are entangled with accountability and from there how new kinds of accountable self might emerge from an increasingly post-human order. I ask whether more ecological metaphors, focused on accountability as a ‘technosphere,’ may better reflect emerging accountability forms where the accountable self emerges as an object increasingly disaggregated from the experienced self.

Public administration increasingly involves artificial intelligence processes, that is computational process that are designed ‘learn’ from their data inputs. In this paper I argue that, when it comes to imagining AI’s impact on administration, we ought not to treat it as an exogenous shock to the system. Instead we ought to treat is as an increasingly endogenous feature of administrative work and indeed as one that will become increasingly unnoticed and, for better or worse, taken for granted. I set this argument out by addressing the sources of accountability. Specifically I focus on the ‘teams’ from which informal accountability relationships emerge. These teams increasingly feature algorithms as non-human members. Such agents, albeit not in the same ways that people do, contribute to people negotiating and navigating their commitments; meanings; intentions; and actions as ‘plural subjects,’ to use Margaret Gilbert’s terms. Accountability itself takes on a ’cyborg’ air as algorithms start to play a role in how plural subjecthood emerges: plural subjects are the repository of the collective agency that is in turn subject to scrutiny within the accountability forum. While the ‘robot on the team’ might fade into the background, its effects will be profound. People, teams and regulatory approaches will come to be coded more and more. While AI will be navigated in the context of existing team commitments, it is more helpful to think of all agency as ahving an increasingly ‘cyborg’ air: as being increasingly infused with algorithmic sensibilities.

In this blog post we address a business and human rights issue that emerged from the recent report of Ireland’s Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Homes: that of corporate complicity in unlicensed clinical trials carried out upon incarcerated children. We give some background on the report and the environment where human rights abuses took place, then outline elements of Ireland’s idiosyncratic regulatory environment and medical system, before pointing both to the dim prospects facing remedy-seeking victims and the necessity for proactive corporate engagement in dealing with the past.

Case review of Okpabi and others versus RDS

In the international business and human rights legal world, policy documents, communications and reports from the OECD, ILO and the UN have all focused on the socio-economic recovery from Covid-19. They have all recognised the impact of the global pandemic, cautioned against diluting human rights and argued that Covid-19 has created a catalyst for change. To date, the response to the crisis by the Northern Ireland government is to react to unfolding economic crises with initiatives to stimulate the economy and protect business. Although we recognise that this is crucial, a more holistic approach to recovery can help future-proof the economy and ensure that recovery champions a better society. As such, we have proposed a draft roadmap that can help achieve this. We recognise that the rights impacted by Covid-19 stretch far beyond what we have proposed. We have focussed on the key areas that touch and concern the business and human rights movement. This is to start, not end the conversation on recovery and ensure the centrality of human rights protections. This framework would allow the Northern Ireland government, businesses registered, based, or with subsidiaries in Northern Ireland, and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) to collectively recover from theCovid-19 crisis in a way that maintains the key tenets of human rights for their citizens and stakeholders.

We focus on Mark Bovens’s use of the forum metaphor in his accountability model. The forum metaphor has emerged as a fundamental component in accountability’s status as a ‘cultural keyword’, reflecting its extension into the political rhetoric and everyday language of our time. People do not imagine value in governance directly, through observation. They construct it through metaphorical language and, when it comes to how the underlying decision-making processes are described, Bovens’s work is at the fore. Contra Bovens, we argue that his relational perspective could be taken much further. We advocate instead a far broader and more fundamental engagement with the idea of relational accountability. Expanding the metaphors, we point to two other accountability spaces: ‘agora,’ a primordial accountability space and ‘bazaar’, an emergent accountability space rooted in ground-level exchange between different actors. Assertions about ‘unaccountability,’ we argue, very often reflect a failure to appreciate the fundamentally relational nature of accountability: those who use such assertions as bases for action aimed at making situations, processes or people ‘more accountable’ in fact seek to assert or impose a certain form of relationship – one that is hierarchical and monopolistic – and reflect therefore a drive to power and domination.

This paper explores the language of corporate accounts of business and human rights. Using innovative methods drawn from computational corpus linguistics, the paper explores discussions of business and human rights in a dataset composed of 346 corporate social responsibility reports drawn from firms in extractive industries. The paper concludes that human rights are ‘put to work’ in corporate accounts by reconfiguring their meaning to draw them into the ‘familiar frames’ of business accounting narratives.

This paper focuses on ’legal but corrupt’ from a pluralist perspective. The plurality of state and non-state laws under which we are governed sets limits on any institutional capacity to name misconduct and from there to discover it. I take ’legal but corrupt’ to denote conduct that is validated, legitimated and justified through an appeal to some institutional rule-set, despite that conduct not measuring up to other expectations for behavior to which the individuals might be held.

In this paper, I present a vision of the corporation as a moral person. I point to ’the separation of ownership and control’ as a moment when the corporation broke away from the moral lives of owner-managers. I then draw out the manner in which we can speak of the company as a moral person. Finally, through a discussion of social reporting in two British banks, I point to a shift in how this moral personhood is articulated, with the rise of corporate governance - or doing business well - as its own foundation of corporate responsibility. I propose a view of corporate responsibility as a ’transmission mechanism’ for the company’s role in moral life, situated in the broader social conception of ‘moral economy/’ This viewpoint sets out landscapes of legitimation and justification through which the ties that underpin economic life are founded.

In this paper we approach administrative ethics as a problem of power. We address the complex interplay of instrumental and moralist concerns as they are brought to bear on administration through the language of ethics. We approach ethics less as a guide for individuals or as a tool for managers and more as one component in the unending struggle to define, shape and wield the institutional purpose towards particular ends. These ends, we hold, emerge in turn from a combination of normative and instrumental concerns and are fundamental in shaping our lives as administrators and indeed as moral persons within our roles.

This paper considers the potential contained in an ‘internalities’ approach to corporate governance. Rather than viewing the company as a ‘black box’ that can only be regulated through state action, we argue that corporate governance holds in tension the relationship between investors, managers and the corporate board. It is from that tension that a change in corporate culture will emerge. We argue that a state focus on promoting and managing the dialogical character of corporate governance will limit the negative effects of corporate power.

This paper addresses the shareholder value paradigm as an accountability claim for the corporation. Shareholder value mechanisms - predominantly in the form of incentives to align the interests of management with those of shareholders - are regarded as a more efficient means for corporate governance than external regulation or direct shareholder control. Nevertheless, any accountability claim must be rooted in a sense of the virtues that legitimate the claims. Without those virtues, mechanisms of control would simply be free-floating uses of force by one section or another in society.

The Parades Commission of Northern Ireland was established to regulate the use of public space in the region. Its formal design includes both a role in mediating between groups over how spaces are used and an adjudicative role when agreement between competing groups cannot be reached. We argue that the Parades Commission has only been effective to the degree that its character as a bureaucracy has quelled violence surrounding parades. The Commission’s goal of conciliation cannot be attained without a more consistent, transparent and inclusive approach to applying law.

Imagined though it is, ’two‐communities’ thinking drives the politics of public institutions in Northern Ireland. Although people seem well‐disposed to power‐sharing in principle, they do not trust that their political opponents’ statements to the same effect are sincere. As this suggests, agreement on the principles of justice is not sufficient for an overlapping consensus to form. People’s social environment must be such that promises and commitments are perceived as more or less risk‐free and that compromise can be entered into without fear of others acting from bad faith.

Using the concepts of thick and thin relationships as the basis for ethical behavior, this paper critiques the emphasis on discretion in the mainstream administrative ethics literature and argues that moral and other dilemmas facing public administrators provide a more useful frame. Two examples drawn from the UK Hutton Investigation into the death of David Kelly are used to demonstrate the relevance and usefulness of this approach.

This article is one of a series commissioned by Government and Opposition exploring identity politics in several national and international contexts. Though ostensibly a civic republic, Ireland has been shaped by a certain conception of Irish culture. Cultural claims are typically political but have the potential to allow community interests to override concern for individual well-being. The construction of the Irish state focused on the maintenance of an idea of being Irish rather than on the welfare of people throughout Ireland, both North and South. As a result, a conservative formulation of Irish identity was locked into the state’s structures.