Bridging the Global Divide in AI Regulation: A Proposal for a Contextual, Coherent, and Commensurable Framework

This paper examines the current landscape of AI regulations, highlighting the divergent approaches being taken, and proposes an alternative contextual, coherent, and commensurable (3C) framework. The EU, Canada, South Korea, and Brazil follow a horizontal or lateral approach that postulates the homogeneity of AI systems, seeks to identify common causes of harm, and demands uniform human interventions. In contrast, the U.K., Israel, Switzerland, Japan, and China have pursued a context-specific or modular approach, tailoring regulations to the specific use cases of AI systems. The U.S. is reevaluating its strategy, with growing support for controlling existential risks associated with AI. Addressing such fragmentation of AI regulations is crucial to ensure the interoperability of AI. The present degree of proportionality, granularity, and foreseeability of the EU AI Act is not sufficient to garner consensus. The context-specific approach holds greater promises but requires further development in terms of details, coherency, and commensurability. To strike a balance, this paper proposes a hybrid 3C framework. To ensure contextuality, the framework categorizes AI into distinct types based on their usage and interaction with humans: autonomous, allocative, punitive, cognitive, and generative AI. To ensure coherency, each category is assigned specific regulatory objectives: safety for autonomous AI; fairness and explainability for allocative AI; accuracy and explainability for punitive AI; accuracy, robustness, and privacy for cognitive AI; and the mitigation of infringement and misuse for generative AI. To ensure commensurability, the framework promotes the adoption of international industry standards that convert principles into quantifiable metrics. In doing so, the framework is expected to foster international collaboration and standardization without imposing excessive compliance costs

Views on the Past, Present, and Future of Business and Information Systems Engineering

‘‘The times they are a-changin,’’ a famous song title by Bob Dylan, also applies to our profession and our subject of study. Information technology has always been a driver for innovation. The recent years, however, have seen IT-based innovations that truly impact everybody’s lives. Everything that can be digitized will be digitized, and this trend is continuing at an amazing speed. For a discipline that looks at the design and utilization of information systems these are exciting times. Yet, it is also a time full of challenges. While our discipline has much to contribute, it competes with other disciplines for topics and ideas. Also, the scope of topics studied has become broader and broader, and so have our methods. While initial work in Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) was often rooted in artificial intelligence, database systems, or operations research, the community has adopted new approaches to address new types of problems. Nowadays, we also have a strong group of academics working primarily with empirical methods or methods from microeconomics, to name just a few. This development towards a more multiparadigmatic discipline also had its challenges and there were controversial discussions along the way

Top-Level Managers' 'Business Knowledge' in a Transition Economy: The Case of Ethiopia

The research reported in this thesis explores the work of knowing which managers bring to their roles in a transition economy context. It focuses on the processes by which a sample of managers in Ethiopia know how to make sense of, and act upon, the differences that make a difference. The point of departure was the contemporary Western construct of 'business knowledge'. But the research problematises this and reveals the processual nature of knowing using a sensemaking perspective. The empirical work involved interviews with 40 top-level managers in five case studies supplemented with 18 interviews with analysts, industry experts and officials at national level. The study found that at the national level, Ethiopian top-level managers' business knowledge tended overall to be uncertain, differentiated, politicised and rapidly evolving. At the organizational level of analysis a number of important differences were revealed in the ways in which these senior managers made sense of the business environment and of their own organizational strategies and capabilities. Four main factors seemed to explain these differences. These were: (a) the degree of perceived reliance on the state for legitimacy and critical resources; (b) the extent to which managers were exposed to market pressures; (c) path dependence; and (d) managers' interpretive orientations. This thesis contributes to the ongoing debates on how top-level managers' judgements on key organisational issues are based upon their sensemaking, their interpretative work and the forms of knowledge which they utilise to frame their decision making. The thesis adds to the conceptualisation and understanding of the nature of managers' knowledge in general and how, in particular, managers make sense of and act upon what they know in a transition economy context. On a wider plane also, this thesis represents a serious attempts to span the cultural divide between, on the one hand, Anglo-centric debates about knowledge and knowing, and, on the other, the Ethiopian business practice. Hence, it offers a novel alternative to the idea that management should be as 'scientific as possible' by illuminating the variety of ways in which different people make sense of experiences in different ways. In doing so, it raises questions about the utility of received thinking about management in various social and cultural contexts

Understanding the Strategic Engagement of Partner Organizations in Large Cross-Sector Social Partnerships Implementing Community Sustainability Plans

Sustainability is a grand challenge that diverse communities of interest all over the world are currently focusing on at the local and global level. At the local level, thousands of cities have decided to address their sustainability goals through local cross-sector social partnerships, while at the global scale, governments of the world have agreed on the universal aim of achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Cross-sector social partnerships have also been identified by researchers and policy makers as a way to address sustainability challenges, with partner organizations from across sectors playing a key role in the achievement of their sustainability goals. Organizations partnering for sustainability are the focus of this dissertation. Many researchers from diverse disciplines claim that organizations join partnerships for strategic reasons, and that sustainability is a strategic opportunity. Integrated literature on strategy, partnerships and sustainability, however, is sparse, and the strategic engagement of organizations in partnerships has been mostly assessed qualitatively. This dissertation draws on strategic management, cross-sector partnerships and sustainability literature to examine the strategic engagement of organizations partnering across sectors for community sustainability. Building on strategic management literature, this dissertation bases its research on three key variables: strategic goals represented as drivers for organizations to join sustainability partnerships, organizational structural features which reflect how organizations structure to implement the partnership’s collective sustainability strategy, and organizational outcomes as what organizations gain from partnering for sustainability. Drivers and outcomes are studied through the management perspective of resource-based view (RBV), that is complemented with a community capitals approach often used in the public policy literature, and structural features are examined through contingency theory drawing from management literature. The questions this dissertation aims to answer are focused on the strategic engagement of organizations in sustainability partnerships through the understanding of organizational structures, the value organizations assign to drivers and outcomes to assess resources through RBV, the implemented structural features to examine contingency theory, and the strategic relationships among these variables. This research collects data through a survey from 224 organizations partnering in large cross-sector partnerships. Each of these partnerships has an approximate minimum of one hundred partners implementing community sustainability plans; these are found in: Barcelona (Spain), Bristol (UK), Gwangju (South Korea), and Montreal (Canada). The survey reached a response rate of 26% allowing findings to be generalizable, showing good reliability, and with unbiased responses across organizations, partnerships, and types of organizations. Within this data set are responses from 71 businesses on their drivers to partner, structural features for partnering, and partner outcomes, which was complemented with qualitative content analyses to study the relationships between businesses partnering for local sustainability, and the SDGs as a proxy to global sustainability. Findings from this research show that organizations implement structures when partnering for sustainability. However, the findings further reveal that structures do not affect the relationships between goals and desired outcomes, and being highly structured is not imperative for achieving valuable outcomes. Results also show that society-oriented resources such as contributing positively to environmental challenges or collaborating with society are the most valuable drivers and outcomes for organizations; informal structural features are the most implemented for addressing sustainability partnerships (for example implementing plans and policies, or partnering with other organizations); and organizations achieve the goals that drive them to partner. No statistically significant relationships were found between drivers and structures, nor between structures and outcomes. Finally, research on businesses shows a positive relationship between business’ drivers and outcomes and the SDGs, representing an opportunity for businesses to achieve their goals and for business outcomes to contribute to global sustainability. Findings from this dissertation contribute to organizational strategic management, partnerships and sustainability literature by confirming quantitatively that sustainability partnerships are strategic for organizations. This dissertation also contributes to the strategy literature by highlighting the key roles of structures and context in the achievement of strategic goals, presenting a theoretical model that integrates different schools of thought. This research also contributes to the refinement of RBV by highlighting with empirical evidence how valuable societal resources are to organizations, and to contingency theory by confirming that informal structural features are how organizations address uncertain and complex environments such as sustainability. Another contribution from this research is to the partnerships literature by highlighting the power that large cross-sector partnerships have in the achievement of organizational goals. With respect to the business literature, this research also contributes to the understanding of businesses in the context of their engagement in local and global sustainability. From these specific contributions, two main conclusions and theoretical contributions arise. First is the relevance of large cross-sector sustainability partnerships, highlighting the contextual role they play, which together with organizational structures, lead organizations to achieve their strategic goals. And second is the value of societal resources, which can be considered strategic for organizations due to the importance that contributing to society has for organizations, and the way these resources are pursued through organizational engagement in cross-sector partnerships

Life-media for a wireless world : participatory democracy and the radio spectrum in Canada and Uruguay

Le spectre radioélectrique est rapidement en train de devenir le médium central, à travers lequel la société communique. Grâce à de multiples facteurs, plusieurs formes de communication, anciennement disparates (la radio, la télévision, la téléphonie mobile, le Wi-Fi) convergent vers la forme éthérée du spectre. L'orientation future de cette convergence dépend largement des acteurs qui sont impliqués dans le design de la réglementation de la communication, ainsi que dans celui des technologies et de leurs usages. Cette thèse doctorale élabore une histoire compréhensive de la communication sans-fil et de sa réglementation, et propose une nouvelle économie politique du spectre, fondée sur la justice sociale. Elle présente, par la suite, une approche épistémologique qui tente de recalibrer les relations entre la société et le spectre radioélectrique. Elle propose que le spectre devra être traité comme une sorte de « média de vie », étant donné qu'il est une composante naturelle de notre environnement et qu'il occupe un rôle central dans notre habilité à exister comme des êtres sociaux communicants. Sa réglementation, alors, devra être sujette au plus haut niveau de participation, de transparence, et d'imputabilité. Cette recherche repose sur une étude de cas internationale et comparative. Elle aborde la capacité des processus de « policymaking » au Canada et en Uruguay à intégrer la participation publique. Elle se fonde sur une documentation extensive et des entretiens avec des législateurs, des régulateurs nationaux et internationaux, des organisations de la société civile, des experts indépendants, des ministères du gouvernement, et des représentants du secteur privé. Des diagnostiques sont établis pour chaque pays et des recommandations politiques concrètes sont faites, qui ne parlent pas seulement des spécificités des politiques du spectre, mais du tissu même de la société démocratique.\ud ______________________________________________________________________________ \ud MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : spectre radioélectrique, politiques de communication, télécommunication, Canada, Urugua

Historical Institutionalism and the Politics of a Knowledge Economy

This dissertation examines the role that domestic institutions can play in the implementation of international intellectual property rights standards. In doing so, it argues that the path dependence of existing institutions can alter how international standards are actually implemented on the ground. It further argues that this altering of standards can create feedback effects that influence related state policies and the international standards themselves. This argument adds to the IPE literature on the creation of international intellectual property (IP) rights, which thus far, has tended to focus primarily on international-level negotiations rather than national-level implementation. It challenges the dominant \u27market power\u27 explanation that emphasizes the role of economic power in setting international regulatory standards. It does so by examining a critical case study of Canada and its implementation of trade-related intellectual property standards. Canada is a critical case due to its high trade dependence on the United States, which makes it \u27least likely\u27 to resist US market power. The dissertation shows how Canada has managed its adoption of trade-related IP standards through institutional layering and conversion strategies at various levels of governance. The analysis argues for, and significantly supports, the value of historical institutionalism in the study of international political economy

E-Governance: Strategy for Mitigating Non-Inclusion of Citizens in Policy Making in Nigeria

The Nigerian federation that currently has 36 states structure adopted the Weberian Public Administrative system before now as an ideal way of running government, which was characterized with the traditional way of doing things without recourse to the deployment of Information Communication Technology (ICT). Today e-governance is seen as a paradigm shift from the previous way of governance. Research has shown that, the adoption and implementation of e-governance is more likely to bring about effective service delivery, mitigate corruption and ultimately enhance citizens’ participation in governmental affairs. However, it has been argued that infrastructure such as regular electricity power and access to the Internet, in addition to a society with high rate of literacy level are required to effectively implement and realize the potentials of e-governance for improved delivery of services. Due to the difficulties currently experienced, developing nations need to adequately prepare for the implementation of e-governance on the platform of Information Communication Technology (ICT). Hence, this study seeks to examine whether the adoption and implementation of e-governance in the context of Nigeria would mitigate the hitherto non-inclusion of citizens in the formulation and implementation of government policies aimed at enhanced development. To achieve the objective of the study, data were sourced and analyzed majorly by examining government websites of 20 states in the Nigerian federation to ascertain if there are venues for citizens to interact with government in the area of policy making and feedback on government actions, as a way of promoting participatory governance. The study revealed that the adoption and implementation of e-governance in the country is yet to fully take place. This is due to lack of infrastructure, low level of literacy rate and government inability to provide the necessary infrastructure for e-governance to materialize. The paper therefore, recommends among others the need for the Federal Government to involve a sound and clear policy on how to go about the adoption and implementation of egovernance through deliberate effort at increasing budgetary allocation towards infrastructural development and mass education of citizens