Research
My research examines authority and accountability in the workplace, especially in the context of technological change. I am currently focused on human–AI augmentation in the workplace — how emerging AI systems reshape the authority of professionals, the accountability of organizations, and the distribution of skill and opportunity at work.
Approach
I use ethnographic and field-based methods — participant observation and interviews — as my primary lens, complemented by comparative-historical analysis of archival data and computational analysis of large text corpora. Combining these approaches lets me trace how work is actually done on the ground while situating those practices within longer historical arcs and larger populations of cases.
Areas
- Sociology of work, occupations, and professions. How occupational groups claim, contest, and lose authority; how the boundaries between professions are drawn and redrawn.
- Organization theory. Accountability, coordination, and control inside and across organizations — including meso-level dynamics between individuals, groups, and institutions.
- Technological and organizational change. How new technologies — platforms, social media, and AI — reconfigure work, authority, and accountability, and how organizations respond.
Topics
- Authority in the workplace. The bases of workplace authority and how status asymmetries between professions shape collaboration and conflict.
- Professional, organizational, and algorithmic accountability. How accountability is produced, obscured, and redistributed as evaluation moves from institutions to crowds and algorithms.
- Human–AI augmentation and reskilling. How AI systems augment (or displace) professional judgment, and the reskilling that augmentation demands.
- Social media scrutiny. How public, crowd-based scrutiny reconfigures the accountability of frontline professionals and the organizations that employ them.
Selected Themes in Recent Work
Several recent papers develop the idea of obscured accountability — the ways in which social-media scrutiny and platform intermediation can diffuse responsibility rather than concentrate it (ASQ 2024; Organization Science 2022). A parallel line of work examines status–authority asymmetry between adjacent professions (ASQ 2022), and a growing body of collaborative work maps the impact of AI on workplace inequality and the governance of platform power (Academy of Management Annals 2024, 2025).