Abstract/Summary

Prior work on organisational accountability has examined various mechanisms and their adequacy or efficacy in making organisations accountable. While instituting different mechanisms are important aspects of ensuring accountability, the assumptions behind the creation of these mechanisms generally construe accountability as conditions imposed upon the accountable entities by the account holders, and portray questions of who is accountable, for what, by what processes, with what criteria acceptable conduct is to be judged as wholly fixed, objective, and pre-determined. Such hierarchical, prescriptive conceptualisations of accountability are embodied in most legal-regulatory frameworks and commonly expressed in the often desperate calls for more and tougher rules and sanctions to be imposed on any organisation or group of organisations whose activities are questionable. In contrast, this study argues that it is not less important— and perhaps more fundamental—to understand how corporate actors co-construct and enact their accountability in the light of the demands being imposed on them. After all, the efficacy of any imposed mechanism partly depends on how the accountable actors themselves make sense of various aspects of their responsibility to others vis-à-vis the conditions, demands and obligations that are being imposed upon them. The focus of this thesis is thus to examine how leaders make sense of the accountability of their organisations to the public, with focus on organisations developing and deploying data-driven technologies. It explores the way in which leaders of these organisations attempt to co-construct accountability system through the language they use in giving accounts of their corporate practices. Focusing on Facebook and Google, two of the largest and most dominant companies in the digital technology industry that are currently facing heightened public scrutiny, the study develops an ethnomethodologically informed discourse analysis of how the CEOs account for the social harms associated with their companies’ innovations. It analysed the testimonial accounts given by the CEOs in their interactions with the US legislators during public hearings organised to interrogate the harmful impacts of the companies’ business models on people’s privacy and safety. The analysis reveals discourses mobilised by the CEOs in dealing with accountability demands. These include (I) notions of choice, consent and control; (II) technological solutions and industry shared identities; and (III) appeals to nationally shared interests, norms and stakes. These patterns of the accounts and the discourses mobilised, I argue, show how the CEOs are negotiating for a particular form of accountability by developing a shared sense of responsibility. With these, the burdens of responsibility are not just placed on the organisations but distributed across a range of actors, including individual service users, third-party app developers, technologies, and other tech companies. The findings illuminate the problems and possibilities of accountability in this context. The implications of these findings are also discussed, specifically, how the findings inform the ongoing debates on governing and regulating Big Tech.