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 in 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 and innovation
• entrepreneurship
• qualitative methods

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 a startup, which was developing an AI that is threatening a form of work long used to distinguish humans from machines: artistic expression, here in the form of music composition. All of those who worked at the organization primarily identified as members of the occupational community their AI would affect: music composers. These people were in an analytically puzzling position. While the literature has demonstrated how members of occupations affected by technologies have strived to preserve their community’s relationship with their work, these people were developing a technology that might compromise it. Kevin discovered how they justified behaving in this way: they positioned the music they were automating as work that they and their community would not find worthy enough to be protected from the advance of machines. Kevin's dissertation suggests that looking closely at what occupation members value may be crucial to understanding what they hold onto and let go on the frontier of the future, especially when developing technologies like AI.