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. He was also a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School, through the blackbox Lab of the HBS AI Institute.
Professor Lee's research interests center on the future of work, with an emphasis on technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. His overarching concern has been for what the people experiencing this future – be it while bringing about or receiving this future – have been evaluating as worthy enough about what exists to be preserved and not be lost. He specifically has investigated the consequences for whether people embrace the future that is coming about and what the future ends up looking like. He has mostly examined these issues of late while studying artificial intelligence (AI) as an emerging technology at work. He has been focusing on what people confronting this technology have interpreted as human about work and how they have been broadly navigating what might happen to this humanness amid the rise of AI. He has drawn primarily on theoretical lenses from organization studies, the sociology of work and occupations, and scholarship on technology and has mainly utilized ethnographic and interviewing methods.
Professor Lee received his PhD in Management & Organizations from New York University's Stern School of Business. He received his BA from Columbia University. He began his career as a management 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
OVERVIEW
My research interests center on the future of work, with an emphasis on the disruptions and other changes to the nature of work that have recently been brought about through technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. My overarching concern has been for what the people experiencing this future – be it while bringing about or receiving this future – have been evaluating as worthy enough about what exists to be preserved and not be lost. I specifically have investigated the consequences for whether people embrace the future that is coming about and what the future ends up looking like. I have mostly examined these issues of late while studying artificial intelligence (AI) as an emerging technology at work, where curiosity about the future and what it will entail has exploded. AI, in being able to autonomously carry out work once thought to be beyond machine capability, has been threatening what is considered to be distinctively human about work, as well as portending the automation of the human claim to work generally. I have been looking at what people confronting this technology have interpreted as human about work and how they have been broadly navigating what might happen to this humanness amid the rise of AI, such as how they have attempted to preserve their claim to work and survive. I have drawn on theoretical lenses from across the social sciences – primarily organization studies, the sociology of work and occupations, and scholarship on technology – and have mainly utilized ethnographic and interviewing methods, where I have attempted to get as close as I can to the coalface of the future of work.
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)
Teaching
OVERVIEW
As a scholar of the future of work, I have shaped my approach to teaching around the fact that we have been living into a future defined by disruption and change, auguring our need for people equipped to lead our organizations, economies, and societies through the unprecedented.
You can find a sample of how students have experienced my teaching here.
KEYWORDS
organizations
future of work and organizing
technology and innovation
entrepreneurship
leadership
Contact
Email
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