Algorithmic Institutionalism

Abstract

Abstract Algorithmic Institutionalism uniquely conceives of algorithms as institutions in contemporary societies, focusing on different dimensions of how algorithms structure decision-making and enact power relations. This work addresses the need for new analytical lenses to make sense of algorithms’ rising ubiquity in decision-making and to foster democratically infused interactions between humans and algorithms. The book contains three sections. The first section (Chapters 1 and 2) explains the underlying concepts of algorithms as institutions. It uses the analytical lens of institutional theories as a framework for studying algorithms to comprehend their social implications properly. The second section (Chapters 3 to 5) applies the framework of Algorithmic Institutionalism to make sense of algorithms’ deployment in security, governments’ platformization, and recommendation systems. The third section (Chapter 6) addresses the challenge of developing approaches to democratize the new political order, even as that order experiences the churn of influence from algorithmic decision-making’s global expansion. This section points to key democratic values that are relevant for contemporary societies constructing legitimate decisions.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 25 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.