Levers of Power in the Field of AI

TL;DR

This ethnographic study investigates how decision makers across academia, government, business, and civil society exercise levers of power to govern AI. It employs a questionnaire-based, Neo-institutionalism-informed framework to elicit personal power dynamics, generating 12 anonymized personas and cross-referencing responses with professional work to produce a dynamics table and five testable hypotheses. The findings illuminate how personal agency, organizational logic, and institutional infrastructure interact to shape governance, stability, and change, highlighting the role of informal networks, crisis-driven adaptation, and cross-sector collaboration. The work offers actionable insights for policymakers and civil society to engage with AI governance and proposes avenues for further research with broader samples.

Abstract

This paper examines how decision makers in academia, government, business, and civil society navigate questions of power in implementations of artificial intelligence. The study explores how individuals experience and exercise levers of power, which are presented as social mechanisms that shape institutional responses to technological change. The study reports on the responses of personalized questionnaires designed to gather insight on a decision maker's institutional purview, based on an institutional governance framework developed from the work of Neo-institutionalists. Findings present the anonymized, real responses and circumstances of respondents in the form of twelve fictional personas of high-level decision makers from North America and Europe. These personas illustrate how personal agency, organizational logics, and institutional infrastructures may intersect in the governance of AI. The decision makers' responses to the questionnaires then inform a discussion of the field-level personal power of decision makers, methods of fostering institutional stability in times of change, and methods of influencing institutional change in the field of AI. The final section of the discussion presents a table of the dynamics of the levers of power in the field of AI for change makers and five testable hypotheses for institutional and social movement researchers. In summary, this study provides insight on the means for policymakers within institutions and their counterparts in civil society to personally engage with AI governance.