OVERVIEW

Kevin's research concerns the changing nature of work and organizing: the dramatic transformations brought about by our societies’ push toward the future, often embodied in our embrace of technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He has paid special attention to a question emblematic of our lived experience of these changes: caught as we are between yesterday and tomorrow, who and what have we been defining as valuable and worthy enough to take with us, as opposed to leave behind? In so asking, his research builds on studies spanning back to the founding of social scientific inquiry. This scholarship weighed what we were gaining against what we were losing at the dawn of the twentieth century, focusing on disruptions like the rationalization of work, the division of labor, and the monetization of social life. Taking inspiration from these classics, as well as from more recent scholarship across social scientific fields like organization theory and sociology, Kevin has attempted to capture and clarify what has been happening today in this new era of change, and has primarily used ethnographic and interview methods to investigate how people on the frontier of the future have been dealing with these transformations to work and organizing.

 

KEYWORDS

future of work and organizing

technology, innovation, & entrepreneurship

social inequality, worth, & evaluation

the lived experience of organizations & institutions

qualitative methods (e.g., ethnography, interviews)

 

DISSERTATION

Augmenting or Automating? Breathing Life into the Uncertain Promise of Artificial Intelligence
Committee: Beth Bechky (chair), Paul DiMaggio, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Damon Phillips

 

In this dissertation, Kevin puzzled over the phenomenon of occupational cannibalization: the fact that members of an occupation ended up developing an AI technology intended to carve away at their community’s work. Initially, these occupation members, in deeply valuing the quality of work done by human beings, began developing the AI in ways that would keep this work within the hold of composers and thus within the community’s boundaries, against its complete takeover by machines. These intentions were sharply at odds with the fact that users of the AI ended up using it in ways that meant completely replacing some members of the occupation. However, these unexpected patterns of use turned out to be consistent with hierarchies of worth within the occupation: the work being automated away was not seen as being of worth, and occupation members were willing to relinquish it, as well as those who did it, across the community’s boundaries to the advance of machines. This is to say, these occupation members’ evaluation of work within their community was crucial to how they conceived of cannibalizing their broader community: part of their broader endeavor to adjudicate what work, as well as workers, should be included within and excluded from it, with implications, more broadly, for what the community should look like.