Karen Elliott | University of Birmingham (original) (raw)
Papers by Karen Elliott
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2015
Based on 148 interviews with European police officers, we explore the role of negative external s... more Based on 148 interviews with European police officers, we explore the role of negative external stakeholder feedback in shaping professional identities. We find that attributional processes act as a buffer against external critique, allowing individuals to maintain positive perceptions of their profession and avoid disidentification. We discuss the implications of these findings for multi-level outcomes, including stakeholder relations and organizational learning.
Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, 2014
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to clarify the diversity of professional perspectives on p... more Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to clarify the diversity of professional perspectives on police culture in an international context. Design/methodology/approach – In a first step the authors developed a standardized instrument of 45 occupational features for comparative analysis of police professional views. This set was inductively created from 3,441 descriptors of the police profession from a highly diverse sample of 166 police officers across eight European countries. Using this standardized instrument, Q-methodological interviews with another 100 police officers in six European countries were conducted. Findings – The authors identified five perspectives on the police profession suggesting disparities in officers’ outlooks and understanding of their occupation. Yet, the findings also outline considerable overlaps in specific features considered important or unimportant across perspectives. Research limitations/implications – The study emphasizes that police culture needs ...
Concerns about the societal impact of AI-based services and systems has encouraged governments an... more Concerns about the societal impact of AI-based services and systems has encouraged governments and other organisations around the world to propose AI policy frameworks to address fairness, accountability, transparency and related topics. To achieve the objectives of these frameworks, the data and software engineers who build machine-learning systems require knowledge about a variety of relevant supporting tools and techniques. In this paper we provide an overview of technologies that support building trustworthy machine learning systems, i.e., systems whose properties justify that people place trust in them. We argue that four categories of system properties are instrumental in achieving the policy objectives, namely fairness, explainability, auditability and safety & security (FEAS). We discuss how these properties need to be considered across all stages of the machine learning life cycle, from data collection through run-time model inference. As a consequence, we survey in this pa...
Vulnerable individuals have a limited ability to make reasonable financial decisions and choices ... more Vulnerable individuals have a limited ability to make reasonable financial decisions and choices and, thus, the level of care that is appropriate to be provided to them by financial institutions may be different from that required for other consumers. Therefore, identifying vulnerability is of central importance for the design and effective provision of financial services and products. However, validating the information that customers share and respecting their privacy are both particularly important in finance and this poses a challenge for identifying and caring for vulnerable populations. This position paper examines the potential of the combination of two emerging technologies, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), for the identification of vulnerable consumers in finance in an efficient and privacy-preserving manner.
Vulnerable individuals have a limited ability to make reasonable financial decisions and choices ... more Vulnerable individuals have a limited ability to make reasonable financial decisions and choices and, thus, the level of care that is appropriate to be provided to them by financial institutions may be different from that required for other consumers. Therefore, identifying vulnerability is of central importance for the design and effective provision of financial services and products. However, validating the information that customers share and respecting their privacy are both particularly important in finance and this poses a challenge for identifying and caring for vulnerable populations. This position paper examines the potential of the combination of two emerging technologies, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), for the identification of vulnerable consumers in finance in an efficient and privacy-preserving manner.
International Journal of Operations & Production Management
Purpose Developing and implementing strategies to maximize profitability is a fundamental challen... more Purpose Developing and implementing strategies to maximize profitability is a fundamental challenge facing manufacturers. The complexity of orchestrating resources in practice has been overlooked in the operations field and it is now necessary to go beyond the direct effects of individual resources and uncover different resource configurations that maximize profitability. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on a sample of US manufacturing firms, multiple regression analysis (MRA) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) are performed to examine the effects of resource orchestration on firm profitability over time. By comparing the findings between analyses, the study represents a move away from examining the net effects of resource levers on performance alone. Findings The findings characterize the resource conditions for manufacturers’ high performance, and also for absence of high performance. Pension and retirement expense is ...
IEEE Security & Privacy, 2016
Cyber-security tends to be viewed as a highly dynamic continually evolving technology race betwee... more Cyber-security tends to be viewed as a highly dynamic continually evolving technology race between attacker and defender. However, economic theory suggests that in many cases doing 'nothing' is the optimal strategy when substantial fixed adjustments costs are present. Indeed, anecdotal experience off chief information security officers by the authors indicates that uncertain costs that might be incurred by rapid adoption of security updates does induce substantial delay, so the industry does appear to understand this aspect of economics quite well. From a policy perspective the inherently discontinuous adjustment path taken by firms can cause difficulties in determining a) the most effective public policy remit and b) assessing the effectiveness of any enacted policies ex-post. This article provides a short summary of the key ideas of the pressing policy issues on the cyber security agenda.
ArXiv, 2021
Financial inclusion depends on providing adjusted services for citizens with disclosed vulnerabil... more Financial inclusion depends on providing adjusted services for citizens with disclosed vulnerabilities. At the same time, the financial industry needs to adhere to a strict regulatory framework, which is often in conflict with the desire for inclusive, adaptive, privacy-preserving services. In this paper we study how this tension impacts the deployment of privacy-sensitive technologies aimed at financial inclusion. We conduct a qualitative study with banking experts to understand their perspective on service development for financial inclusion. We build and demonstrate a prototype solution based on open source decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials software and report on feedback from the banking experts on this system. The technology is promising thanks to its selective disclosure of vulnerabilities to the full control of the individual. This support GDPR requirement, but at the same time, there is a clear tension between introducing these technologies and fulfilling ...
The British Horse Industry Confederation and Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs’ (20... more The British Horse Industry Confederation and Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs’ (2005) Strategy for the Horse Industry in England and Wales (Strategy) expresses an ambitious vision to transform the traditional horse-world into a horse industry by 2015. The Horse Strategy calls for all equestrians to become stakeholders, responsible for implementing its central aims of increasing grassroots participation and encouraging engagement with the Horse Strategy. Since 2005, little is known about stakeholders’ experiences of the implementation process or what degree of progress has been made towards creating the horse industry. Given the complex number of groups involved each with their own sets of interests and motives to engage with the horse-world, it is expected that implementation of the Horse Strategy forms a complex wicked problem that is unforeseen and poorly treated. This thesis explores regional representatives, local authority council policy officers and grassroots e...
Cyber-security tends to be viewed as a highly dynamic continually evolving technology race betwee... more Cyber-security tends to be viewed as a highly dynamic continually evolving technology race between attacker and defender. However, economic theory suggests that in many cases doing ‘nothing’ is the optimal strategy when substantial fixed adjustments costs are present. Indeed, anecdotal experience off chief information security officers by the authors indicates that uncertain costs that might be incurred by rapid adoption of security updates does induce substantial delay, so the industry does appear to understand this aspect of economics quite well. From a policy perspective the inherently discontinuous adjustment path taken by firms can cause difficulties in determining a) the most effective public policy remit and b) assessing the effectiveness of any enacted policies ex-post. This article provides a short summary of the key ideas of the pressing policy issues on the cyber security agenda.
ArXiv, 2020
Concerns about the societal impact of AI-based services and systems has encouraged governments an... more Concerns about the societal impact of AI-based services and systems has encouraged governments and other organisations around the world to propose AI policy frameworks to address fairness, accountability, transparency and related topics. To achieve the objectives of these frameworks, the data and software engineers who build machine-learning systems require knowledge about a variety of relevant supporting tools and techniques. In this paper we provide an overview of technologies that support building trustworthy machine learning systems, i.e., systems whose properties justify that people place trust in them. We argue that four categories of system properties are instrumental in achieving the policy objectives, namely fairness, explainability, auditability and safety & security (FEAS). We discuss how these properties need to be considered across all stages of the machine learning life cycle, from data collection through run-time model inference. As a consequence, we survey in this pa...
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
To design and develop AI-based systems that users and the larger public can justifiably trust, on... more To design and develop AI-based systems that users and the larger public can justifiably trust, one needs to understand how machine learning technologies impact trust. To guide the design and implementation of trusted AI-based systems, this paper provides a systematic approach to relate considerations about trust from the social sciences to trustworthiness technologies proposed for AI-based services and products. We start from the ABI+ (Ability, Benevolence, Integrity, Predictability) framework augmented with a recently proposed mapping of ABI+ on qualities of technologies that support trust. We consider four categories of trustworthiness technologies for machine learning, namely these for Fairness, Explainability, Auditability and Safety (FEAS) and discuss if and how these support the required qualities. Moreover, trust can be impacted throughout the life cycle of AI-based systems, and we therefore introduce the concept of Chain of Trust to discuss trustworthiness technologies in all stages of the life cycle. In so doing we establish the ways in which machine learning technologies support trusted AI-based systems. Finally, FEAS has obvious relations with known frameworks and therefore we relate FEAS to a variety of international 'principled AI' policy and technology frameworks that have emerged in recent years. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Sociology; • Social and professional topics → Computing / technology policy; • Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy; • Computing methodologies → Artificial intelligence; Machine learning.
In the digital era, we witness the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to solve proble... more In the digital era, we witness the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to solve problems, while improving productivity and efficiency. Yet, inevitably costs are involved with delegating power to algorithmically based systems, some of whose workings are opaque and unobservable and thus termed the “black box”. Central to understanding the “black box” is to acknowledge that the algorithm is not mendaciously undertaking this action; it is simply using the recombination afforded to scaled computable machine learning algorithms. But an algorithm with arbitrary precision can easily reconstruct those characteristics and make life-changing decisions, particularly in financial services (credit scoring, risk assessment, etc.), and it could be difficult to reconstruct, if this was done in a fair manner reflecting the values of society. If we permit AI to make life-changing decisions, what are the opportunity costs, data trade-offs, and implications for social, economic, technical, le...
European Management Review
Journal of Organizational Change Management
Purpose In this paper, the authors develop a cognitive organization theory (COT) of organizationa... more Purpose In this paper, the authors develop a cognitive organization theory (COT) of organizational change. COT was developed in the 2000s, by taking insights from cognitive psychology and anthropology to rebuild the foundation of organizational ecology (OE), grounding macro processes of organizational legitimation, inertia and mortality in micro processes of appeal and engagement. COT also explored the micro-level process of organizational change, arguing that four features (i.e. asperity, intricacy, opacity, and viscosity) of an organization's texture impact the appeal of organizational change. However, to data, empirical studies of a COT of organizational change are absent. An important reason is that many of the new COT constructs are not linked to empirical measures. The purpose of this paper is to develop reliable and valid survey measures of COT's key constructs. Design/methodology/approach The authors follow a three-step procedure to develop reliable and valid survey ...
Academy of Management Proceedings, 2015
Based on 148 interviews with European police officers, we explore the role of negative external s... more Based on 148 interviews with European police officers, we explore the role of negative external stakeholder feedback in shaping professional identities. We find that attributional processes act as a buffer against external critique, allowing individuals to maintain positive perceptions of their profession and avoid disidentification. We discuss the implications of these findings for multi-level outcomes, including stakeholder relations and organizational learning.
Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategies & Management, 2014
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to clarify the diversity of professional perspectives on p... more Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to clarify the diversity of professional perspectives on police culture in an international context. Design/methodology/approach – In a first step the authors developed a standardized instrument of 45 occupational features for comparative analysis of police professional views. This set was inductively created from 3,441 descriptors of the police profession from a highly diverse sample of 166 police officers across eight European countries. Using this standardized instrument, Q-methodological interviews with another 100 police officers in six European countries were conducted. Findings – The authors identified five perspectives on the police profession suggesting disparities in officers’ outlooks and understanding of their occupation. Yet, the findings also outline considerable overlaps in specific features considered important or unimportant across perspectives. Research limitations/implications – The study emphasizes that police culture needs ...
Concerns about the societal impact of AI-based services and systems has encouraged governments an... more Concerns about the societal impact of AI-based services and systems has encouraged governments and other organisations around the world to propose AI policy frameworks to address fairness, accountability, transparency and related topics. To achieve the objectives of these frameworks, the data and software engineers who build machine-learning systems require knowledge about a variety of relevant supporting tools and techniques. In this paper we provide an overview of technologies that support building trustworthy machine learning systems, i.e., systems whose properties justify that people place trust in them. We argue that four categories of system properties are instrumental in achieving the policy objectives, namely fairness, explainability, auditability and safety & security (FEAS). We discuss how these properties need to be considered across all stages of the machine learning life cycle, from data collection through run-time model inference. As a consequence, we survey in this pa...
Vulnerable individuals have a limited ability to make reasonable financial decisions and choices ... more Vulnerable individuals have a limited ability to make reasonable financial decisions and choices and, thus, the level of care that is appropriate to be provided to them by financial institutions may be different from that required for other consumers. Therefore, identifying vulnerability is of central importance for the design and effective provision of financial services and products. However, validating the information that customers share and respecting their privacy are both particularly important in finance and this poses a challenge for identifying and caring for vulnerable populations. This position paper examines the potential of the combination of two emerging technologies, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), for the identification of vulnerable consumers in finance in an efficient and privacy-preserving manner.
Vulnerable individuals have a limited ability to make reasonable financial decisions and choices ... more Vulnerable individuals have a limited ability to make reasonable financial decisions and choices and, thus, the level of care that is appropriate to be provided to them by financial institutions may be different from that required for other consumers. Therefore, identifying vulnerability is of central importance for the design and effective provision of financial services and products. However, validating the information that customers share and respecting their privacy are both particularly important in finance and this poses a challenge for identifying and caring for vulnerable populations. This position paper examines the potential of the combination of two emerging technologies, Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and Verifiable Credentials (VCs), for the identification of vulnerable consumers in finance in an efficient and privacy-preserving manner.
International Journal of Operations & Production Management
Purpose Developing and implementing strategies to maximize profitability is a fundamental challen... more Purpose Developing and implementing strategies to maximize profitability is a fundamental challenge facing manufacturers. The complexity of orchestrating resources in practice has been overlooked in the operations field and it is now necessary to go beyond the direct effects of individual resources and uncover different resource configurations that maximize profitability. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on a sample of US manufacturing firms, multiple regression analysis (MRA) and fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) are performed to examine the effects of resource orchestration on firm profitability over time. By comparing the findings between analyses, the study represents a move away from examining the net effects of resource levers on performance alone. Findings The findings characterize the resource conditions for manufacturers’ high performance, and also for absence of high performance. Pension and retirement expense is ...
IEEE Security & Privacy, 2016
Cyber-security tends to be viewed as a highly dynamic continually evolving technology race betwee... more Cyber-security tends to be viewed as a highly dynamic continually evolving technology race between attacker and defender. However, economic theory suggests that in many cases doing 'nothing' is the optimal strategy when substantial fixed adjustments costs are present. Indeed, anecdotal experience off chief information security officers by the authors indicates that uncertain costs that might be incurred by rapid adoption of security updates does induce substantial delay, so the industry does appear to understand this aspect of economics quite well. From a policy perspective the inherently discontinuous adjustment path taken by firms can cause difficulties in determining a) the most effective public policy remit and b) assessing the effectiveness of any enacted policies ex-post. This article provides a short summary of the key ideas of the pressing policy issues on the cyber security agenda.
ArXiv, 2021
Financial inclusion depends on providing adjusted services for citizens with disclosed vulnerabil... more Financial inclusion depends on providing adjusted services for citizens with disclosed vulnerabilities. At the same time, the financial industry needs to adhere to a strict regulatory framework, which is often in conflict with the desire for inclusive, adaptive, privacy-preserving services. In this paper we study how this tension impacts the deployment of privacy-sensitive technologies aimed at financial inclusion. We conduct a qualitative study with banking experts to understand their perspective on service development for financial inclusion. We build and demonstrate a prototype solution based on open source decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials software and report on feedback from the banking experts on this system. The technology is promising thanks to its selective disclosure of vulnerabilities to the full control of the individual. This support GDPR requirement, but at the same time, there is a clear tension between introducing these technologies and fulfilling ...
The British Horse Industry Confederation and Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs’ (20... more The British Horse Industry Confederation and Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs’ (2005) Strategy for the Horse Industry in England and Wales (Strategy) expresses an ambitious vision to transform the traditional horse-world into a horse industry by 2015. The Horse Strategy calls for all equestrians to become stakeholders, responsible for implementing its central aims of increasing grassroots participation and encouraging engagement with the Horse Strategy. Since 2005, little is known about stakeholders’ experiences of the implementation process or what degree of progress has been made towards creating the horse industry. Given the complex number of groups involved each with their own sets of interests and motives to engage with the horse-world, it is expected that implementation of the Horse Strategy forms a complex wicked problem that is unforeseen and poorly treated. This thesis explores regional representatives, local authority council policy officers and grassroots e...
Cyber-security tends to be viewed as a highly dynamic continually evolving technology race betwee... more Cyber-security tends to be viewed as a highly dynamic continually evolving technology race between attacker and defender. However, economic theory suggests that in many cases doing ‘nothing’ is the optimal strategy when substantial fixed adjustments costs are present. Indeed, anecdotal experience off chief information security officers by the authors indicates that uncertain costs that might be incurred by rapid adoption of security updates does induce substantial delay, so the industry does appear to understand this aspect of economics quite well. From a policy perspective the inherently discontinuous adjustment path taken by firms can cause difficulties in determining a) the most effective public policy remit and b) assessing the effectiveness of any enacted policies ex-post. This article provides a short summary of the key ideas of the pressing policy issues on the cyber security agenda.
ArXiv, 2020
Concerns about the societal impact of AI-based services and systems has encouraged governments an... more Concerns about the societal impact of AI-based services and systems has encouraged governments and other organisations around the world to propose AI policy frameworks to address fairness, accountability, transparency and related topics. To achieve the objectives of these frameworks, the data and software engineers who build machine-learning systems require knowledge about a variety of relevant supporting tools and techniques. In this paper we provide an overview of technologies that support building trustworthy machine learning systems, i.e., systems whose properties justify that people place trust in them. We argue that four categories of system properties are instrumental in achieving the policy objectives, namely fairness, explainability, auditability and safety & security (FEAS). We discuss how these properties need to be considered across all stages of the machine learning life cycle, from data collection through run-time model inference. As a consequence, we survey in this pa...
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency
To design and develop AI-based systems that users and the larger public can justifiably trust, on... more To design and develop AI-based systems that users and the larger public can justifiably trust, one needs to understand how machine learning technologies impact trust. To guide the design and implementation of trusted AI-based systems, this paper provides a systematic approach to relate considerations about trust from the social sciences to trustworthiness technologies proposed for AI-based services and products. We start from the ABI+ (Ability, Benevolence, Integrity, Predictability) framework augmented with a recently proposed mapping of ABI+ on qualities of technologies that support trust. We consider four categories of trustworthiness technologies for machine learning, namely these for Fairness, Explainability, Auditability and Safety (FEAS) and discuss if and how these support the required qualities. Moreover, trust can be impacted throughout the life cycle of AI-based systems, and we therefore introduce the concept of Chain of Trust to discuss trustworthiness technologies in all stages of the life cycle. In so doing we establish the ways in which machine learning technologies support trusted AI-based systems. Finally, FEAS has obvious relations with known frameworks and therefore we relate FEAS to a variety of international 'principled AI' policy and technology frameworks that have emerged in recent years. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Sociology; • Social and professional topics → Computing / technology policy; • Security and privacy → Human and societal aspects of security and privacy; • Computing methodologies → Artificial intelligence; Machine learning.
In the digital era, we witness the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to solve proble... more In the digital era, we witness the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) to solve problems, while improving productivity and efficiency. Yet, inevitably costs are involved with delegating power to algorithmically based systems, some of whose workings are opaque and unobservable and thus termed the “black box”. Central to understanding the “black box” is to acknowledge that the algorithm is not mendaciously undertaking this action; it is simply using the recombination afforded to scaled computable machine learning algorithms. But an algorithm with arbitrary precision can easily reconstruct those characteristics and make life-changing decisions, particularly in financial services (credit scoring, risk assessment, etc.), and it could be difficult to reconstruct, if this was done in a fair manner reflecting the values of society. If we permit AI to make life-changing decisions, what are the opportunity costs, data trade-offs, and implications for social, economic, technical, le...
European Management Review
Journal of Organizational Change Management
Purpose In this paper, the authors develop a cognitive organization theory (COT) of organizationa... more Purpose In this paper, the authors develop a cognitive organization theory (COT) of organizational change. COT was developed in the 2000s, by taking insights from cognitive psychology and anthropology to rebuild the foundation of organizational ecology (OE), grounding macro processes of organizational legitimation, inertia and mortality in micro processes of appeal and engagement. COT also explored the micro-level process of organizational change, arguing that four features (i.e. asperity, intricacy, opacity, and viscosity) of an organization's texture impact the appeal of organizational change. However, to data, empirical studies of a COT of organizational change are absent. An important reason is that many of the new COT constructs are not linked to empirical measures. The purpose of this paper is to develop reliable and valid survey measures of COT's key constructs. Design/methodology/approach The authors follow a three-step procedure to develop reliable and valid survey ...