Kevin W. Lee

OVERVIEW

My research concerns the future of work and organizing. I have looked closely at how the push toward the future has collided with existing work and organizational arrangements. I have focused on what these moments have revealed is valuable to us, looking specifically at how we have culled between what is valuable enough to take with us into the future versus leave behind. In particular, I have been studying our attempts at preserving the humanness of our work amid ongoing challenges to this valued aspect of our lives, as with the threat posed by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. In so asking, my research builds on studies spanning back to the founding of social scientific inquiry. This scholarship weighed what we might be gaining and losing about our work, organizations, and lives at the dawn of the twentieth century, focusing on threats like the rationalization of work, the division of labor, and the monetization of social life. I have taken inspiration from these classics, as well as from more recent study across social scientific fields like organization theory and sociology, to clarify what has been happening today. To do so, I primarily have used qualitative methods, ranging from ethnography to interviews.

 

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.