and economic context in which they’re played. As platform companies like Upwork encourage users to score points to win clients and mega-corporations like Meta seek to transform our entire life into a fully gamified VR experience, Jagoda offers some intriguing avenues for thinking about how workers are being reconfigured as “players” in the broader game of business—a development that organizational scholars would do well to consider.

For many workers, COVID-19 catalyzed a rapid disappearance of the physical organization and a dramatic rise in technologically mediated forms of organizing. Prior research on remote and virtual work has largely focused on what changes enable virtual workers to succeed, under the assumption that these virtual workers would represent a minority of the workforce and would primarily occupy specialized roles. Key questions to be asked are: do we need to revisit our thinking about virtual work in light of our changed, and changing, circumstances? And what might the recent, widespread virtualization of work teach us not just about virtual work, but, also, about workers and organizations, more broadly? Our goal with this symposium is to feature future-of-work scholars who can share their insights into the ways that we might understand virtual work anew, as well as the ways that virtualization can impact how workers understand themselves, their work, and their organizations. The presentations contained in this symposium cover newcomer socialization, the doing of virtual work, the emotional costs of that work, and workers’ reflections upon the transition to virtual work. In so doing, they invite us to question both scholarly and practitioner assumptions about virtual work and highlight the ways in which workers shape their experience of work. Benefits To Onboarding Remotely? Building Trust With Supervisors Without Face-To-Face Contact Presenter: Mailys George; IESE Business School Presenter: Kevin W. Rockmann; George Mason U. The Work Of Getting to Work: Independent Workers and The Articulation Work People Engage In... Presenter: Melissa Mazmanian; U. of California, Irvine Presenter: Ingrid Erickson; Syracuse U. School of Information Presenter: Margaret Jack; Syracuse U. School of Information The Emotional Costs Of Remote Work Arrangements Presenter: Christine Beckman; U. of Southern California Presenter: Cynthia Wilkes; U. of Southern California You Can Take It With You: Worker Adaptation To The Virtualized Organization Presenter: Julia Coff; New York U. Presenter: Frances J. Milliken; New York U. Presenter: Kevin Woojin Lee; U. of British Columbia

The purpose of this symposium is to explore the relationship between time and technology in our processes of work and organizing. We wish to deepen our theoretical understanding about this relationship by investigating it across multiple levels of analysis and in various contexts and conditions. Our symposium does so by drawing on fascinating studies that span different contexts, including technology hackathons, artificial intelligence for music, the Swiss watchmaking industry, virtual teams during the COVID-19 pandemic, and hotel management. By drawing on this empirical research and making connections across contexts, this symposium offers insights into how members of today’s workplaces relate to the technologies that constitute their everyday lives, whether and how they accept them and their consequences as a legitimate part of what their world should look like, and which temporalities – be it excitement for modernization or profound wistfulness for a bygone age – therein win out. At stake is the shape of our shared future: not only what worlds we will build, but also how we in turn will find ways to live within these worlds of our own making. Sustained paradox for strategic reorientation: Preserving the past and modernizing for the future Presenter: Ryan L. Raffaelli; Harvard U. Presenter: Richard DeJordy; California State U., Fresno Presenter: Rory Morgan McDonald; Harvard U. Augmenting or automating? Breathing life into the uncertain promise of artificial intelligence Presenter: Kevin Woojin Lee; New York U. Minimal and adaptive coordination: How hackathons’ projects accelerate innovation without killing it Presenter: Hila Lifshitz-Assaf; New York U. Presenter: Sarah Lebovitz; U. of Virginia Presenter: Lior Zalmanson; Tel Aviv U. Experimenting with virtual teamwork: Learnings from how teams adapted their activities during COVID Presenter: Ashley Whillans; Harvard Business School Presenter: Aurora Turek; - Presenter: Leslie Perlow; Harvard U. Temporal burdening and temporal commitment: How technology and time serve Ideal Workers Presenter: Melissa Mazmanian; U. of California, Irvine Presenter: Christine Beckman; U. of Southern California

Commercialization has spread across nonmarket spheres of social life, altering the modus operandi of their members, organizations, and institutions. Scholarship has mainly emphasized people’s cognition: how people living through commercialization have been thinking through this experience and its consequences. However, an emerging set of studies has uncovered deeply emotional instances of resistance to commercialization, suggesting a need to go beyond this cognitive institutional perspective. In this study, we examine an opera company which commercialized. Mirroring their field’s emerging concerns about opera’s ability to survive, the company’s administrators made organizational changes that attempted to cut costs. However, these organizational and institutional changes compromised aspects of the company’s work, which had been supported by its older institutional context. And in delving into company members’ lived experience of these changes, we discovered their profound sense of loss, embodied in their intense feelings of frustration and sorrow. Looking closely at an organization’s commercialization thereby allowed us analytical purchase on what we refer to as its members’ “anachronization”: they were left behind by the changing character of the times, were increasingly out of step with how their world – that is, their work and organization – was being structured, and were haunted by what had vanished. And in studying this experience, we found that value tethers people to institutions: its destruction evoked members’ passionate refusal to let go, and their ardent repudiation of how the nature of their work was changing. We therein breathe meaning and feeling into our depictions of how people experience change by drawing attention to noncognitive aspects of life within organizations and institutions.

Though beginning with deterministic views on how technologies affect organizations, organizational scholars have made significant progress since, providing a variety of nuanced frameworks by which to understand disruptive workplace technologies - such as AI - and what effects they may have. However, lessons learned about technology and organizing in the literature’s development seem to have been lost in today’s discourse on AI. For instance, Collins (2018) bemoans the state of this discourse, noting our tendency to view this technology deterministically: an unstoppable force which will consume everything in its path. Our symposium is an attempt at re-orienting the emerging literature on AI and their effect on work and organizing. It aims at leaving determinism behind to instead uncover the complex negotiations – among humans and between the social and technical – which both shape and are shaped by AI, and the consequences of such negotiations for AI’s development and use. It does so by drawing on and comparing across four ethnographic studies on AI from the very edge of the future of work: a response to scholars’ concern that “discourse on the topic is largely speculative, focusing on the possibilities” (Brayne 2017: 977) rather than grounded in what has actually been going on (see also Barley and Kunda 2001; Bechky 2011). Doubting the Diagnosis: Using AI when Forming Critical Professional Judgments Presenter: Sarah Lebovitz; U. of Virginia “It’s Like Being in the Future” vs. “It’s a Joke”: Divergent Interpretations of Facial Recognition Presenter: Elizabeth Anne Watkins; Columbia U. Augmenting or Automating? Breathing Life into the Promise of Artificial Intelligence Presenter: Kevin Woojin Lee; New York U. The Interpretation of Machine-Learning Technologies in Organizations Presenter: Katherine C. Kellogg; MIT

This essay takes as its starting point Gernot Grabher and Jonas Konig's (2020) piece, "Disruption, Embedded. A Polanyian Framing of the Platform Economy," and suggests focusing on how digital platforms are realized on the ground. We propose that the people experiencing platformization have a strong influence over the futures that platforms can evoke. To illuminate this interplay between people and platforms, we offer a taxonomy of three ways that people intervene in how platforms produce the future: innovation, articulation, and opposition. In doing so, we build on Grabher and Konig's essay to enrich the analytical and predictive power of their framework. Moreover, we provide the beginnings of a theoretical framework of our own - namely, a sociology of people's performances and their role in future-making - which we believe can contribute to ongoing discussions on the future of work and organizing.

There has been a great deal of uncertainty and fear in recent years regarding how digital technologies might reshape how we work, organize, and live (Barley, Bechky, and Milliken 2017; see also Orlikowski and Iacono 2000). Our symposium was organized in response to this uncertainty and fear, providing a series of grounded, ethnographic studies on technologies which have been at the forefront of the popular and academic imagination (e.g. artificial intelligence, robotics, and algorithms). Collectively, the papers in this symposium aim to elaborate on questions such as the type of work that goes into developing these technologies, the kind of futures their developers have been imagining might proceed from these technologies, these technologies’ consequences for how we work and organize, and how we might deal with the consequences of these technologies. Knowing Art, Knowing Technology: Algorithmic Expertise and the Reconfiguration of Work? Presenter: Sarah Sachs; Columbia U. Augmenting or Automating? Hesitantly Breathing Life into the Promise of Artificial Intelligence Presenter: Kevin Woojin Lee; New York U. The Darker Side of Shadow Learning: The Fate of the Cohort and the Consumer Presenter: Matthew Beane; U. of California, Santa Barbara Authenticity and Materiality: Tackling Gendered Activities in Hobbyist Collectives Presenter: Rohini Jalan; U. of Oxford

Few have contested that work and organizations have transformed in meaningful ways over the past few decades, leading to the rise of what many call a “new” economy. Notably, interest in entrepreneurship and startup companies has skyrocketed amidst the rise of the new economy. In examining the role that startups will play in the new economy, researchers have enthusiastically linked startups with favorable trends such as job creation. However, these depictions have been overly positive and have neglected to address the negative consequences that startups may have. Drawing on an influential history of scholarship on the dark side of organizational life, we inductively studied a startup which built up employee commitments to its core value of “transparency” and later reneged on the value. In particular, we unearthed the emotional pain and disillusionment that employees experienced after the company reneged on “transparency” as a core value. We believe that these employees’ heartbreaking experiences highlight startups’ capacity to harm their employees. Our case thus provides a cautionary tale on the negative consequences that working within startup companies can have, helping us to ultimately rethink the positive depictions of startups’ role in the new economy which currently dominate the academic and popular imagination.

Much has been written within organizational scholarship on the topic of turnarounds, or cultural change, and how leaders navigate the uncertainty and resulting conflict that change efforts bring. However, this literature has predominantly focused on the rhetorical strategies by which leaders can implement turnarounds, neglecting a burgeoning literature which has increasingly focused on the role that materiality plays amidst organizational life. This study attempts to demonstrate that organizational materiality is a serious consideration amidst turnaround efforts. In particular, this study asserts that individuals process change efforts materially as well as rhetorically-that an organization’s materiality is deeply associated with certain cultural values and that individuals interpret changes to an organization’s materiality as disruptions of the cultures and values within which they are contextualized. It does so by studying an opera house and the turnaround efforts it implemented in the last few months before its ultimate demise.