About this Research Topic
Over the last three decades, continuous waves of digitization have significantly transformed traditional ways of organizing and performing work, reshaping routines, norms, and ethics. The proliferation of intelligent technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), robots, intelligent chatbots, and other algorithms necessitates a nuanced understanding of their implications for work, professionals, and organizations.
Current scholarship has begun to focus on the context-dependent impact of intelligent technologies on work, highlighting the institutional, organizational, and professional level factors affecting this interplay. While institutional and organizational factors facilitate the adoption of intelligent technologies through what Bernhardt and colleagues call the adjustment process, individuals shape the adoption process in the face of imposed work reconfigurations through terrain control contestations. This often results in newly defined professional boundaries, roles, and discretionary jurisdictions.
Despite recent scholarship attempting to study and highlight the consequences of intelligent technology-led changes for work and workers, there remains limited systematic understanding of how this change happens. Additionally, the long-term implications of intelligent technologies for work and workers are underexamined.
This interdisciplinary Research Topic aims to examine and develop a critical understanding of how intelligent technologies are reconfiguring work at both the individual and collective level. It aims to explore how these changes can be negotiated and regulated through formal and informal means, thereby advancing the relationship between intelligent technologies and the future of work.
We are particularly interested in research that identifies institutional, organizational, and individual-level (macro-meso-micro) factors affecting the deployment, adoption, and appropriation of intelligent technologies by organizations, and their implications for workers. This Research Topic aims to reimagine work in the era of intelligent technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Prospective articles can be situated in any industry, with any methodological approach (empirical or conceptual) and level of analysis—individual, group, professional/occupational, organizational, or institutional—as long as the focus is on the implications of intelligent technologies for the future of work.
Topics of interest include:
Intelligent technologies and macro-meso level transformations and challenges:
• what are the implications of intelligent technologies for work reconfiguration?
• how do intelligent technologies alter or reproduce existing social and technological/material structures (e.g., business models, organizational structures?)
• how do intelligent technologies transform service provision and work practices (e.g., professional routines)?
Intelligent technologies and micro-level transformations and challenges:
• how do professionals mediate, embrace, or resist the impact of intelligent technologies on their work routines, professional roles, jurisdictions, and boundaries. Including issues such as: challenged professional agency, professional sensemaking, professional identity, algorithmic management, intelligent technologies-enabled decision-making, Intelligent technologies, and the automation-augmentation paradox.
Ethical implications of intelligent technologies:
• how are the implications of intelligent technologies for work different from those of non-intelligent technologies?
• how do these implications differ from existing literature examining the impact of intelligent technologies on work – how has the politics of work transformed as a result? These questions raise further pertinent issues about what makes intelligent technologies distinct, warranting a new ethical outlook. This outlook is not only limited to potential unemployment but also includes concerns such as the digital divide, transparency, explainability, algorithmic bias, responsibility gap, responsible AI, and privacy, among others.
We strongly encourage authors to submit Manuscript Summaries by the deadline above for editors to evaluate their fit for the Research Topic. Please contact the Topic Editors or editorial office at sociology.submissions@frontiersin.org if you have any questions about the suitability of your research for this Research Topic.
Current scholarship has begun to focus on the context-dependent impact of intelligent technologies on work, highlighting the institutional, organizational, and professional level factors affecting this interplay. While institutional and organizational factors facilitate the adoption of intelligent technologies through what Bernhardt and colleagues call the adjustment process, individuals shape the adoption process in the face of imposed work reconfigurations through terrain control contestations. This often results in newly defined professional boundaries, roles, and discretionary jurisdictions.
Despite recent scholarship attempting to study and highlight the consequences of intelligent technology-led changes for work and workers, there remains limited systematic understanding of how this change happens. Additionally, the long-term implications of intelligent technologies for work and workers are underexamined.
This interdisciplinary Research Topic aims to examine and develop a critical understanding of how intelligent technologies are reconfiguring work at both the individual and collective level. It aims to explore how these changes can be negotiated and regulated through formal and informal means, thereby advancing the relationship between intelligent technologies and the future of work.
We are particularly interested in research that identifies institutional, organizational, and individual-level (macro-meso-micro) factors affecting the deployment, adoption, and appropriation of intelligent technologies by organizations, and their implications for workers. This Research Topic aims to reimagine work in the era of intelligent technologies from an interdisciplinary perspective.
Prospective articles can be situated in any industry, with any methodological approach (empirical or conceptual) and level of analysis—individual, group, professional/occupational, organizational, or institutional—as long as the focus is on the implications of intelligent technologies for the future of work.
Topics of interest include:
Intelligent technologies and macro-meso level transformations and challenges:
• what are the implications of intelligent technologies for work reconfiguration?
• how do intelligent technologies alter or reproduce existing social and technological/material structures (e.g., business models, organizational structures?)
• how do intelligent technologies transform service provision and work practices (e.g., professional routines)?
Intelligent technologies and micro-level transformations and challenges:
• how do professionals mediate, embrace, or resist the impact of intelligent technologies on their work routines, professional roles, jurisdictions, and boundaries. Including issues such as: challenged professional agency, professional sensemaking, professional identity, algorithmic management, intelligent technologies-enabled decision-making, Intelligent technologies, and the automation-augmentation paradox.
Ethical implications of intelligent technologies:
• how are the implications of intelligent technologies for work different from those of non-intelligent technologies?
• how do these implications differ from existing literature examining the impact of intelligent technologies on work – how has the politics of work transformed as a result? These questions raise further pertinent issues about what makes intelligent technologies distinct, warranting a new ethical outlook. This outlook is not only limited to potential unemployment but also includes concerns such as the digital divide, transparency, explainability, algorithmic bias, responsibility gap, responsible AI, and privacy, among others.
We strongly encourage authors to submit Manuscript Summaries by the deadline above for editors to evaluate their fit for the Research Topic. Please contact the Topic Editors or editorial office at sociology.submissions@frontiersin.org if you have any questions about the suitability of your research for this Research Topic.
Keywords: work, Intelligent Technologies, artificial intelligence, workers, digitization, organizations, machine learning, natural language processing, robots, ethics
Important Note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.
