About my research: Organisational control over AI
What does it mean for an organisation to remain in control when AI becomes part of its decisions? My research looks beyond who gives the final approval to the choices, judgements and organisational arrangements that shape what can happen.
I approach these questions from several perspectives. Management, philosophy, law and computer science each offer important ways of understanding them, but they do not always ask the same questions or mean the same thing by the words they use. I am interested in what becomes clearer when those perspectives are brought together, including where they disagree.
The doctoral research
My PhD at Coventry University is titled “The Treatment of Fairness in Business Decisions About People, When Those Decisions Are Supported by AI”.
It asks how fairness is understood and put into practice when AI supports decisions about people. Recruitment and promotion provide the setting: decisions in which organisational priorities, individual circumstances, legal obligations and judgements about people meet.
The study draws on 30 in-depth interviews conducted between 2022 and 2024. It explores participants’ accounts of what fairness meant, why it mattered, how they tried to achieve it and what changed when AI became involved.
What emerged
Fairness was not a single, settled requirement waiting to be translated into a system. Participants understood it in different ways, worked within competing priorities, and described efforts spread across policies, processes, technology and individual judgement.
The thesis examines how AI can give these existing difficulties new forms. Decisions about data, objectives and thresholds can shape the options available later, while the person expected to take responsibility may have little visibility of those earlier choices.
This is not simply a claim that AI inherits historical bias. It also concerns legitimate organisational choices about how to operate, what happens when those choices are formalised, and whether people can recognise and reconsider their consequences.
Evidence, explanation and contribution
The interviews provide accounts of organisational experience. I interpret those accounts alongside academic literature to explain the conditions they reveal and develop two theoretical contributions.
The first extends the analysis of responsibility and control to actors whose choices shape decisions from upstream. The second examines when different interpretations of fairness matter to an outcome and proposes a framework for making those differences visible.
The study does not measure how common these conditions are across businesses, and it does not establish that the proposed approaches work in practice. Those distinctions matter to how the work should be understood and developed.
Explore the research
Click below for the seven themes developed from the interviews and what they reveal about organisational practice.
Click below for details of the participants, analysis, methodology and limits of the evidence.
Click below for theoretical arguments, proposed approaches and questions that remain open.
The wider inquiry
Fairness is a substantial research interest in its own right and a foundation for my wider work on organisational control over AI. That work includes how judgement is formalised, what information is lost or changed, and whether people have the means to exercise the responsibility they are given.
I welcome conversations about the arguments, alternative interpretations and opportunities to investigate these questions further. Get in touch if there is something we could usefully explore together.