Research
How is AI changing the nature of work? I answer that question empirically, from the inside: by following the people whose jobs are already matched, priced, evaluated, and managed by algorithms, and by building tools with them.
Online labor platforms are the first workplaces where algorithms, not managers, do most of the managing. They match workers to tasks, set and adjust prices, score performance, and decide who is visible to whom. That makes them a living laboratory for the questions now facing every organization adopting AI: what happens to individual careers, to teams and collaboration, and to organizational structure when the decisions that shape work are made by systems no one in the workplace fully sees.
My research program approaches those questions at three levels — the individual worker, the organization, and the technology itself — and combines longitudinal qualitative methods with human-centered design. Three shifts frame the work: the move to digitally enabled remote work, the rise of knowledge and service work as engines of the economy, and the drift in employment from the career, to the job, to the project.
AI tools for the workers algorithms manage
Online labor markets are designed in ways that favor the buyers of labor, with matching and pricing algorithms that are opaque to the people doing the work. With NSF support, my colleagues and I are working with online workers and the organizations that support them to design, deploy, and evaluate AI-enhanced tools that help workers manage their profiles, workload, and performance on their own terms. The project uses value-sensitive design, and its premise is that AI in the workplace can be built for the workforce, not only for the firm.
Careers under algorithmic management
Since 2019 my collaborators and I have followed a panel of 70 online workers, completing more than 450 interviews to date. The project asks how careers, identities, and livelihoods take shape when a platform's algorithms stand between worker and firm — and, because it is longitudinal, how those effects accumulate over years rather than in a single snapshot. Our analytical strategy combines cross-sectional comparisons within each wave, longitudinal comparison across waves, and comparative case analysis, with structured case studies of each respondent feeding fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis.
Flexibility, beyond scheduling
Flexibility is one of the defining shifts in the future of work, and it is the common denominator of most non-standard arrangements: compressed hours, flextime, co-working, contracting, platform work, micro-tasking, nomadic work, portfolio careers. Yet scholarship on platform workers has focused almost entirely on one dimension of it, flexible scheduling, largely because scheduling flexibility is structurally built into contract work. Much less attention has gone to the other factors that create or undermine flexibility for platform workers. My work demarcates those dimensions, including task and spatial flexibility, and shows how gender, occupation, and crisis (the pandemic, above all) reshape what flexibility is worth.
Organizations born on platforms
Digital entrepreneurship research asks how digital technologies shape, and are shaped by, entrepreneurial processes. I study founders who built agencies inside the Upwork platform, examining how platform infrastructure shapes founder attributes and the organizational structures they create, and reconceptualizing established constructs of entrepreneurial orientation and entrepreneurial skills for a context where the market, the rules, and much of the technology belong to someone else.
About the digital entrepreneurship project →
Work in progress
Current manuscripts extend the program toward the organizational and health consequences of algorithmic work: Algorithmic Exposure: Worker Health and Safety in the Era of Digital Platforms; The Emergence of Transactional Careers: The Evolution of Professional Work in the Platform Economy (with Munoz, Kim, O'Neil, Salman, and Sawyer, under review); and On or Off the Platform? Relational Work and Platform Dependence in Online Freelancing (with Mao and Jarrahi, under review).