Kevin W. Lee

OVERVIEW

My research concerns the future of work and organizing. I have looked closely at how the push toward the future, as embodied in situations like the advance of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, has collided with existing work and organizational arrangements. I have recently focused on our attempts at preserving the humanness of our work amid ongoing challenges to this valued aspect of our lives, as part of my broader interest in how we have culled between what we might take with us into the future versus leave behind. In investigating these topics, I build on an interest that has been core to social scientific inquiry since its founding at the dawn of modernity. These foundational studies similarly weighed what we were gaining against what we were losing at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing on disruptions like the rationalization of work, the division of labor, and the rise of industrial capitalism. Taking inspiration from these classics, as well as from recent scholarship in organization theory and sociology, I have attempted to capture and clarify what has been happening today in this new era of change. I have primarily used ethnographic and interview methods to investigate how people at the edge of the future have been dealing with these transformations to work and organizing.

 

KEYWORDS

future of work and organizing

technology, innovation, & entrepreneurship

worth, evaluation, & social inequality

the lived experience of organizations & institutions

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

 

DISSERTATION

Monsters of Our Own Creation: AI, Occupational Communities, and the Soul of Work
Committee: Beth Bechky (chair), Paul DiMaggio, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Damon Phillips

 

My dissertation addresses how we have navigated the advance of AI technologies across today’s economies and societies. In particular, it addresses a puzzle I encountered with regard to how we have navigated the notion of our humanness, and what we more broadly value enough to take with us versus leave behind, in this era of change. This puzzle came up as I was using ethnographic and interview methods to examine work seen as distinctively human – namely, artistic expression, in the form of music composition – and the occupational community behind it. While scholarship on occupational communities has tended to expect that members might push against threats like technological rationalization and protect the human beings of the community from being automated away, I discovered that members might instead spearhead such technological rationalization, in ways that threaten to automate away the community. The music composers at the heart of my study specifically used their experience with and understanding of the work of music composition to build an AI that composes music. And though they intended for the AI to be used by and even collaborate with other composers across the community, the AI ended up being used in video content production, to compete with and automate away the community. They, in turn, made sense of this situation by drawing on definitions of worth native to the community. Specifically, they drew on the fact that composers did not see the work that was being automated away as very human, in that it was not infused with much of what they called the composer’s soul. As such, the work, as well as those who did it, were not seen as worthy enough to protect, paving the way for them to be automated away.