Kevin W. Lee

OVERVIEW

I am an organization theorist specializing in the sociology of work, occupations, and technology. My research interests specifically concern the rise of the future of work, or the recent changes that are occurring in the technical core of what workers materially produce through organizations for our economy and society. In particular, I have homed in on the question of how the workers experiencing these changes have lived through and weighed the various possible futures that could unfold and how such considerations, in turn, have informed whether and to what extent workers have accepted how their work has been changing. And consistent with these interests, a central component of my research agenda of late has been investigating how the emerging future, as recently brought about by technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), has come to threaten what workers consider to be human about their work, specifically with regard to how workers have variously thought through and navigated the possibility of losing this sense of humanness in their work. At stake has been what the future of work comes to look like: whether workers, at the extremes, accept it and help to bring it about or resist it in ways that can foil its ability to come about and be made real in how the work is structured within organizations.

To study these issues, I primarily use qualitative methods like ethnography and interviewing. I use these methods for a few different reasons. First, they are well-suited to studying emerging and undertheorized phenomena like the future of work. Specifically, our own immersion in the real world allows us as ethnographers to see what is happening to work and to pick up on trends that otherwise go unnoticed by scholars. Second, qualitative methods are well-suited to studying data that is subjective, highlighting the meanings that people make. My commitment to this kind of data is rooted in its analytical value, in unpacking and explaining my interests with regard to the future of work. Specifically, what the future of work looks like rests, in large part, on what it is subjectively like to live into it. Worker are likely resist a given imagination of the future of work when their experience of this future comes to be interpreted as unacceptable by the workers receiving it. Studying the subjective side of workers’ experience, then, is crucial to understanding what the future of work is like, with regard to whether workers buy into and participate in making real the future that they are experiencing. And given their ability to tap into the subjective, qualitative methods are well-suited to getting at my core concerns.

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

Monsters of Our Own Creation: AI, Occupational Solidarity, and the Soul of the Future of Work
Committee: Beth Bechky (chair), Paul DiMaggio, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, Damon Phillips

Theories on occupational communities foundationally conceived of them as sites of social solidarity, or a sense of moral obligation to others within the community, in ways that have echoed across and persisted into contemporary thought on these communities. By contrast, I saw that occupation members, rather than necessarily standing in solidarity with one another, can be inconsistent and even contradictory in whether they extend their own moral obligation to others in the community. So, how do we account for this disjuncture between our existing theories on occupational solidarity and what I observed? I saw these dynamics while studying a startup of music composers who were developing an AI that composes music. The composers at the startup initially tried to stand in solidarity with the community. They defined worth within the community inclusively to mean that they would protect the work of music composition even if it had been merely touched by a human being, designing the technology to protect and even collaborate with composers from across the community. However, they began facing a situation in which a new user, while promising to provide a return on investment on the AI, was using the AI to automate away some composers and their work. Those within the startup, in turn, began defining worth more discriminatingly, distinguishing between music that was human and thus worthy of being protected and music, as well as composers, that could be automated. And given these findings, I suggest that we need to entertain the idea of a situationalist lens on occupational solidarity, in which we bring out the role that situations play in how workers think about things like moral obligation and solidarity across their occupational community. Reshaping the underlying lens that we are taking on occupational solidarity, in turn, can help to explain why it is that occupation members may be inconsistent and even contradictory over time in their solidarity. As such, occupational communities, even if theorized as sites of solidarity which will protect their own from threats like automation, may not be. Workers may not be able to rely on their occupational communities to protect them.