How Should We Study Intelligent Technologies’ Implications for Work and Employment?

After providing a review of current research on how intelligent technologies (such as artificial intelligence) may alter work and employment, this chapter points to two problems in the existing literature, namely an isolationist view of technology and a reductionist view of work. It then sketches how researchers might surmount these problems by viewing technologies as technological systems organized as stacks of components and by approaching the implications of implemented technologies through role systems analysis. The chapter ends with suggestions for how researchers might study technological stacks and role systems in order to better document how intelligent technologies may affect work and employment.

How Do Technologies Change Organizations?

This chapter proposes a model of when and how new technologies will bring about changes in organizational structures and cultures. It argues that the key to such transformations lies in whether technologies alter roles and role relationships. Unless both roles and role relations change, new technologies are unlikely to have a significant effect on how organizations are structured. To determine whether roles and role relations have changed, it is useful to adopt a dramaturgical approach to analyzing encounters. Specifying the scripts that characterize encounters typical of the setting under investigation is central to such an analysis. The approach is illustrated by means of case studies of medical imaging and of how the Internet has begun to change the way car salesmen related interact with customers.

What is a Technological Revolution?

Almost daily we are told how some new technology will revolutionize in our lives. The truth of the matter is most technologies do not. However, occasionally a new technology does appear which provides the grounding for gradual changes that eventually transform our systems of production and the way we live our lives. Historically, we speak of these developments as technological revolutions. By focusing on how such technologies change the nature of work, occupational structures, and systems of production, this chapter attempts to answer two questions: “What is a technological revolution?” and, more importantly, “How do current technologies associated with artificial intelligence fit into the history of technological change?”

Managing the Fears of Studying Technical Work

Technical work differs significantly from most other forms of work. This chapter explores those differences and how the differences pose important challenges for ethnographers who seek to study engineers, scientists, and other technical workers. The chapter summarizes the experience of thirty-five years’ of studying technical work to capture the social dynamics of technical worlds in the way that an earlier generation of scholars captured the social worlds of industrial, craft, and clerical work. The discussion revolves around how to handle six fears that ethnographers face when studying technical work: the fear of looking stupid, the fear of mishearing, the fear of failing to understand what technical terms mean, the fear of not capturing the complexity of the work, the fear of not finishing the study, and the fear of not being able to make sense of one’s data.