Kevin W. Lee
Biography
Kevin W. Lee is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia's Sauder School of Business. He is a member of the Organizational Behaviour & Human Resources division and holds an affiliation with the Entrepreneurship & Innovation group.
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? Pursuant to these interests, his dissertation is an ethnographic study of a startup, 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.
Kevin has presented this research at leading conferences in the fields of organization theory and sociology, including conferences of the Academy of Management, the American Sociological Association, and the European Group for Organizational Studies. Among other awards, he is the recipient of the Microsoft Fellowship for the Study of the Future of Work and Organizations, a fellowship from the Fubon Center for Technology, Business, and Innovation, and a runner-up recognition for the Best Entrepreneurship Paper Award from the Academy of Management's Organization and Management Theory (OMT) division. He is also currently serving on the leadership of the OMT division, as Social Media co-chair.
Kevin received his PhD in Management & Organizations from New York University's Stern School of Business and pursued undergraduate studies at Columbia University. He began his career working in Manhattan as a strategy consultant to some of Wall Street's most prominent financial institutions, witnessing first-hand their disruption by entrepreneurs and technologists at the cutting edge of the digital revolution.
Research Interests
future of work and organizing
technology, innovation, & entrepreneurship
social inequality, worth, & evaluation
the lived experience of organizations & institutions
qualitative methods (e.g., ethnography, interviews)
teaching
We have been living through an exciting, if often terrifying, age: one wracked by the rise of political populism and polarization, the passionate protest of age-old social inequalities, the alarming onset of climate change, the birth of technologies beyond our predecessors’ wildest imaginations, and a global pandemic. These changes, among others, have augured our need for people equipped to navigate and lead our organizations, economies, and societies through unprecedented situations. Through his teaching, Kevin aims to cultivate future leaders prepared to deal with these situations. To do so, Kevin attempts to nurture his students' ability to analyze situations they face, to embrace uncertainty, and to effectively collaborate with others working alongside them.
© 2016