Moving beyond Principles: Identifying Actionable AI Fairness Practices
Abstract
Because artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly mediates organizational work, fairness has become a critical governance challenge. Existing frameworks often prioritize abstract ethical principles rather than fairness-specific ones and lack actionable guidance across the entire AI lifecycle. This study addresses the principles-to-practice gap in AI fairness governance. We develop actionable AI fairness practices and draw on a socio-technical and praxiological lens, conducting discourse and thematic analyses of 60 academic, policy, and practitioner sources. From these analyses, we derive a structured set of AI fairness practices in a comprehensive, AI lifecycle-spanning matrix organized by obligation degree and organizational role. The matrix provides dynamic, role-specific guidance to support implementation and sustainment of AI fairness. By extending the AI fairness beyond abstract principles to operationalized, actionable practices, we contribute to IS scholarship and offer a modular governance scaffold.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.18502,
title = {Moving beyond Principles: Identifying Actionable AI Fairness Practices},
author = {Christoph Burtscher and Mateusz Dolata},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.18502},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
In Proceedings of 34th European Conference on Information Systems. June 12-17, 2026. Milan, Italy