RESEARCH CENTER FOR WORK, TECHNOLOGY, AND ORGANIZATION

Projects

Governing Responsible Innovation

Through empirical projects across domains of innovation, we examine how various forms of knowledge and expertise compete and collaborate to shape notions of what constitutes responsible innovation and forms of governance.

Projects

Engineering Trust in Connected Automated Driving (Soumyo Das)

The concept of autonomous mobility systems – for example, driverless cars – has been around since Da Vinci’s futuristic explorations in the early 1500s. However, it has only been in the 21st century that some of those concepts made gravel. The phenomenon has captured the attention of businesses, regulators, investors, and consumers alike, and yet, the biggest challenge to the success of such technological innovations lay in regulators’ and consumers’ ambivalence towards such autonomous technologies. The question then lies, how can businesses build automated driving technologies which people can come to trust? How do engineers and designers navigate the complex narratives of regulatory expectations, business aspirations, & market diffidence, to design trustworthy autonomous mobility systems? What is the role of regulators and policymakers in influencing such processes? And who are the other actors and what role do they play in the engineering-trust game?

Integrating Cobots in Complex Organizational Settings (Marjolaine Rostain, Ruthanne Huising, Nadine Bender)

Based on interviews, the authors try to understand the process and challenges of implementing cobots (collaborative robots) in industrial setting. They focus on how work and roles are reconfigured after the implementation of such robots as the human-machine interaction is highly different than for usual robots. Particularly, they highlight through different case studies how the flexibility/complexity paradox of these cobots may be a challenge for their implementation.

Constructing Ethically Aligned Design (Marjolaine Rostain, Teresa Domenech)

This project examines the IEEE’s consultative process for developing governance principles and guidelines for technologists and scientists developing autonomous and intelligent systems.

Adjucating Uncertainty (Parham Ashur, Teresa Domenech)

This multi-methods project examines how numerous expert groups deliberated on and produced policy recommendations regarding the risks and benefits of gain of function research.

Pragmatic Regulation (Ruthanne Huising)

This three-year field-level ethnography examines the actors, expertise, and interactions that produced a new regulatory framework for research with biological materials in Canada.

Governance & Regulations

Projects

Lobbyists as Brokers: The Work of Influencing Federal Policy (Nicholas Occhuito)

This project examines the work of federal lobbyists in the United States. Drawing on ethnographic observations, and interviews with federal contract lobbyists, government affairs officials, legislative directors and legislative assistants of both House and Senate members, political fundraisers, and watchdog organizations, I show that lobbyists are an occupational group that act as intermediaries, connecting politics and business, to accomplish the interdependent work of producing public policy.

Pragmatic regulation, Relational Regulation: In ongoing Collaboration (Ruthanne Huising, Susan Silbey) 

In this project we conceptualize organizations as the locus of contemporary governance.The growing profusion of regulations, external standards, codes of conduct, and prosocial expectations require that organizations devote increasing attention and resources to managing myriad self-regulation processes. We examine how organizations, drawing on accountability infrastructures, align routines with external demands, often with help from emerging professions, consultants, and technologies but ultimately relying on the integration of new habits across the organization through pragmatic, relational techniques.

The Relational Aspects of Regulating Clinical Work (Kartikeya Bajpai) 

This project examines organizational attempts to monitor and influence the work of professionals through the use of internal regulatory agents. In particular, the study examines the case of clinical documentation specialists within hospitals, who serve as internal regulatory agents and monitor the clinical notes of physicians.

Expertise for the 21st Century

Through a collection of theoretical and empirical projects, we examine how new technologies are reshaping collaborations between experts and machines and ongoing changes in how expertise is produced, institutionalized, evaluated, and valued.

Projects

Epistemic Skill: Reintegrating Conception and Execution on the Shop Floor (Marjolaine Rostain)

Based on an eight month ethnography of a highly automated machine shop, the authors develop the concept of epistemic skill as a means through which shop-floor workers develop the resources to increase their discretion over their work and develop more autonomy. Epistemic skill refers to the ability to read, interpret, and manipulate the conceptual material—including drawings, simulations, program code, and other symbol-laden materials—that inform the execution of work. This skill allows workers to integrate, periodically, the conception of their work with its execution.

Professions and Artificial Intelligence (Kartikeya Bajpai, Pauli Pakarinen, Ruthanne Huising)

Recent analyses and narratives predict that professional work will increasingly be performed via artificial intelligence. We examine central assumptions underlying such predictions through a review of empirical studies of professional work. We highlight problematic assumptions in the future of professional work and argue that attempts to institutionalize professional expertise in machines, detached from its relational context, may likely be mediated, partial, and less efficacious than expected.

Role Reconfiguration-The Implications of Technological Change for Work and Collaboration in Healthcare (Heloise Agreli, Ruthanne Huising)

Based on a scoping review of ethnographic studies of technology implementation in a variety of contexts (from primary care to operating room) and of diverse technologies (from health informatics systems to robotics), the authors develop a typology of four types of role reconfiguration: negotiation, clarification, enlargement and restriction. They discuss leadership challenges in managing role reconfiguration and formulate four leadership priorities. They suggest that leaders: redesign roles proactively, paying attention to interdependencies; offer opportunities for collective learning about new technologies; ensure that knowledge of new technologies is distributed across roles and prepare to address resistance.

Governance of Expert Work

Projects

Treading Carefully: The Challenges of Expert Work in Public Organizations (Samantha Ortiz-Casillas)

The work of government organizations is often performed by members of professions or expert workers that must answer to techno-legal mandates while also being sensitive to the interests and directives of political appointees and democratically elected leaders. This research project considers the tension between politics and expertise and examines the case of regulation and policy analysts in a government agency in Mexico. In particular, I look at how the work of these analysts is affected by what is perceived to be an increasingly hostile political environment that questions the value and legitimacy of evidence-based practices. With an 18-month ethnographic study, I examine how analysts perceive and manage the tensions emerging from contradictory techno-legal and political mandates, in order to protect their work and organization.