Matt T. Clark

Profile

Before coming to Leeds, I completed an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree at UCL and a MSc in Philosophy of the Social Sciences at the LSE. I then worked in the non-profit sector, latterly advociating for the importance of mental health research in healthcare and policy making. My work for organisations that aimed to do good combined with my philosophical interests in the nature and capabilities of groups into the core concern which continues to drive my research.

I have recently passed my viva, which explains how collective entities, in particular businesses, can be trustworthy. In answering this, I make significant contributions to our understanding of trust, the nature of organisations and businesses, and the moral capabilities of collectives.

I plan to continue my research into what organisations are and can do and into the social and political role of trust.

Research interests

My research looks at how we build trust in business through better regulation, something that is important as we increasingly rely on business corporations to tackle the climate crisis and enact social change. I research the ethical aspects of regulation, how capable organisations are of behaving ethically, and what trust is.

Through my doctoral work, I have argued for a new way to understand trust and trustworthiness. I argue that there are different forms of trustworthiness and trust, and that research can better guide us to build trust by paying greater attention to this diversity of trust.

I have also developed a novel account of organisational agency, on which an organisation can act through its members in a coordinated way in virtue of those members having become jointly obliged to respond to a shared decision-making structure, by acting so as to assure one another that they will reliably do so.

I also argue that much modern regulation of businesses, which focuses on building “trust” between the public, regulators and businesses, may be misguided, because it has failed to properly understand what is required for a business to be trustworthy.

My research interests are incresingly focused on what the political role of organisations - like businesses, NGOs and political parties – is.

Qualifications

• MSc Philosophy of the Social Sciences, London School of Economics & Political Science
• BA European Social and Political Studies, University College London