Stafford Beer Medal


This award is named in memory of Stafford Beer, a world leader in the development of systems ideas, especially management cybernetics, and President of The OR Society 1970-71.

The Stafford Beer Medal is awarded in recognition of the most outstanding contribution to the philosophy, theory or practice of Information Systems published in the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) within the relevant year.

 

 

Stafford Beer

Stafford Beer

Citation for the Stafford Beer Medal 2023

Tapani Rinta-Kahila, Ida Someh, Nicole Gillespie, Marta Indulska, Shirley Gregor

Algorithmic Decision-Making and System Destructiveness: A Case of Automatic Debt Recovery

The judges were impressed with the timeliness and pertinence of articles in the recent volume of EJIS under consideration for the Stafford Beer award, tackling issues such as fake online reviews, the risks of applying people analytics and automated algorithmic decision-making. This latter topic is addressed in the winning paper. The paper examines the negative unintended consequences of algorithmic decision-making using a case study of the Australian government’s “Robodebt” programme. The paper takes systems thinking and organisational limits perspectives to develop a set of generalisable mechanisms that can benefit investigations of the consequences of algorithmic decision-making. The judges were impressed with the article’s clear arguments, focus on a pressing real-world issue and contributions that have practical relevance to organisations worldwide.

European Journal of Information Systems Vol 31 (3), 313–338

https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2021.1960905

Stafford Beer winners 2023 w/o names

Tapani Rinta-Kahila, Ida Someh, Marta Indulska, Nicole Gillespie and Shirley Gregor

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Guidelines

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