Thinking about social systems
Why is it useful to think about social systems?
Impact assessments are used by many organisations, either for legal or internal purposes. While these processes provide organisations with a clear plan for documenting their processes, these types of exercises have been criticised as ‘box ticking exercises’ which don’t provide the space for the deeper thinking required to tackle big social problems like inequality.
One way of trying to improve the effectiveness of your impact assessments is to think about this like a social scientist. One way to do this would be to consider using a layered approach, to better consider the full scope of effects associated with a technology. This kind of thinking is foundational in fields like sociology, public policy, systems thinking, and critical technology studies. It is also essential for understanding the social impacts of algorithmic technologies. In the social sciences, there’s three commonly used layers to describing social systems:
- The micro level, which focuses on individuals and their relationships with each other. At this level, you are focusing on the thoughts, feelings, and opinions of individuals specifically, and what type of relationships these individuals have with each other, or relationships an individual might have with organisations.
- The meso level, which focuses on groups of individuals. This can be small communities, large organisations, or anything in between. At this level, you focus more on how groups interact with other groups, how individual behaviour influences group dynamics, and how macro-level systems influence group behaviour.
- The macro level, which focuses on large social structures, for examples legal systems, the educational system, government or global organisations. At this level, it might also be prudent to consider ideologies and how wide-spread beliefs impact the micro and meso level, as well as other macro level systems.
The boundaries between these levels isn’t clear cut, and is used more as a framework for understanding and studying societal dynamics that being a perfect fit. Additionally, it’s important to consider the relationship between the levels, as well as each level itself.
Worksheets
Here are some worksheets to think about the social systems your algorithmic technology might be deployed within.
Further Resources
Selbst, A.D. et al. (2018) ‘Fairness and Abstraction in Sociotechnical Systems’, in 2019 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT*). Available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3265913 (Accessed: 11 November 2020).
Seaver, N. (2017) ‘Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems’, Big Data & Society, 4(2), p. 205395171773810. Available at: doi.org/10.1177/2053951717738104.
Moss, E. and Metcalf, J. (2020) ‘Ethics Owners: A New Model of Organizational Responsibility in Data-Driven Technology Companies’.