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 is also currently a visiting scholar at the Harvard Business School, through the blackbox Lab of the Data, Digital, and Design (D^3) Institute.
Professor Lee's research concerns the changing nature of work and organizing: those transformations brought about by the push toward a future increasingly oriented around technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He has paid special attention to a question emblematic of our lived experience of these changes: what have we been defining as valuable enough to take with us, as opposed to leave behind? Pursuant to these interests, his dissertation was an ethnographic study of music composers who were developing a generative artificial intelligence (AI) technology that threatened to cannibalize their own occupational community.
Professor Lee 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.
Professor Lee 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 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 concerns the changing nature of work and organizing: those transformations brought about by the push toward a future increasingly oriented around technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. He has paid special attention to a question emblematic of our lived experience of these changes: what have we been defining as valuable enough to take with us, as opposed to leave behind? In so asking, my 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, I have attempted to capture and clarify what has been happening today in this new era of change. To do so, I have primarily used inductive qualitative methods, ranging from ethnography to interviews, 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
worth, evaluation, & social inequality
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
While ethnographically studying a startup developing an artificial intelligence (AI) technology, I puzzled over the phenomenon of “occupational cannibalization”: the fact that occupational members who ran the startup – namely, music composers – ended up developing an AI intended to carve away at their community’s work of music composition. Initially, those at the startup developed the AI to keep this work within the hands of members of the occupation, against its complete takeover by machines. This said, the AI started to be used in ways that did not allow for this imagined future. Instead, the people who started to use it – namely, video content producers – were able to produce music for their videos on their own through the AI, instead of having to hire the music composers they traditionally relied on. In other words, and contrary with the initial intentions of those developing the technology, the AI ended up being used to completely replace some of the occupation’s members. However, and as argued by composers at the startup and beyond it, these emerging patterns of use were consistent with hierarchies of worth within the occupation: the work being automated away, given that it was not seen as being “soulful” in the ways that composers cherished, was not seen as worthy enough to be saved by the occupation’s members. The composers both at the startup and beyond thus were willing to relinquish this work, as well as those who did it, across the community’s boundaries to the advance of machines.
Teaching
OVERVIEW
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 unprecedented situations. To cultivate such leaders of tomorrow’s organizations, economies, and societies, I aim to nurture my students’ ability to analyze situations they face, to embrace uncertainty, and to effectively collaborate with others working and living alongside them (even and especially alongside those considered to be different).
KEYWORDS
organizational theory & behaviour
technology, innovation, & entrepreneurship
leadership of organizations
work & employment
EXPERIENCE AT UBC SAUDER
Instructor, Management & Organizational Behaviour (UG)
EXPERIENCE AT NYU STERN
Instructor, Management & Organizations (UG)
TF, Leadership in Organizations (MBA)
TF, Patterns of Entrepreneurship (UG)
TF, Managing People & Teams (UG)
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