ABSTRACT This study explores how white‐collar workers perceive AI‐driven chatbots, and how affordances and constraints shape their help‐seeking behaviours. Help‐seeking is essential for learning and collaboration but is often limited by social barriers. Drawing on Affordance Theory, this research examines how technological and social affordances influence chatbot use. Based on 24 in‐depth interviews, conducted between May and December 2023, at the inception of ChatGPT's public diffusion, the study reveals that chatbots offer judgement‐free support for repetitive and informational tasks, fostering autonomy and bypassing interpersonal discomfort. However, concerns about trust, limited capabilities, surveillance and job security constrain adoption. Individual mindset and age, together with organisational culture (e.g., innovation climate), further influence use. Chatbots redefine help‐seeking as a human‐machine dynamic, complementing rather than replacing human support. The study highlights the importance of designing chatbot systems that align with user needs and workplace cultures. In doing so, it contributes to debates on algorithmic management and worker autonomy and offers practical implications for integrating AI tools to support knowledge sharing and collaboration in work environments.
ABSTRACT The year 2026 marks forty years since New Technology, Work and Employment was first published. In this article, we reflect on the history and success of ‘New Technology, Work and Employment’ as we celebrate the journal's 40th year. We outline the origins and developments of the journal, with the key themes and debates that have been published since the journal was launched in 1986. We clarify the aims and scope of the journal, and offer some guidance for future submissions. We provide insights into the current focus of the journal, and reflect on the challenges posed by contributions that always seek to focus on the latest technological wave. We end with offering some new avenues for the journal's future.
ABSTRACT This article examines how unions moderate online democratic participation. Prior research has underlined the need for unions to actively moderate this participation, either to foster or restrict it. However, we are still largely unaware of how unions concretely perform this emerging democratic function. To address this gap, we conducted an in‐depth case study of a union Facebook group, drawing on rare and extensive empirical material. Our findings reveal that online democratic moderation involves navigating between verticalizing and horizontalizing logics, each in pursuit of different goals in terms of access to participation, the status of members, opinion formation, and perceptions of democraticness. By conceptualising these two logics and their related tensions, the study contributes to the literature by showing how online democracy reinvigorates enduring tensions within union democracy, and by demonstrating how the affordances of digital technology shift moderation from ex‐ante procedural ‘scene‐setting’ to continuous, influence‐based ‘actor‐directing.’
