OVERVIEW

Kevin's research concerns the changing nature of work and organizing: the dramatic transformations brought about by our societies’ pursuit of progress, efficiency, and rationality, 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 the past and the future, 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

 

Kevin's dissertation is an ethnographic study of an AI development startup, whose members primarily identified as being a part of the very occupational community that the company’s technology would automate: music composers. This was puzzling, given a vast literature which has demonstrated, by contrast, how members of occupations often have strived to protect their community’s relationship with its work against threats like technology. Kevin thus investigated how the people in his study ultimately justified working on this technology: they positioned the music they were automating (as well as the people who relied on this form of work to make a living) as not worthy enough to the community to be protected from the advance of machines. In so doing, Kevin has been unraveling an important set of social dynamics at the core of recent trends in socioeconomic inequality, especially as perpetuated by people situated in technology development organizations. That is, Kevin has uncovered the cultural processes by which these people may symbolically stratify their own communities and throw some of their own under the bus to account for and legitimate the technological futures they are building.