AI and the Value of Work

Session Submission Type: Paper Session (90 minute)

Description

This session invites papers that explore how technology —especially the rise of generative AI—is shaping the value, meaning, and organization of work. As new tools promise to automate decision-making, enhance productivity, and change the nature of coordination, organizations and workers are left to grapple with unprecedented promises and pitfalls. We welcome submissions that examine how these processes affect not only the structure and outputs of work, but also ethical concerns and the social and moral evaluation of different kinds of labor. How do technologies like AI reduce or reproduce longstanding inequalities in whose labor is visible, valued, or deemed replaceable, especially along lines of race, gender, age, and occupational status? How are technologies changing workplace interactions and relations? What new dilemmas emerge when machines are positioned as independent creative agents, collaborative “colleagues”, or managers? How are workers negotiating threats to professional identity and autonomy?

Sub Unit

• Organizations, Occupations, and Work Section / AI and the Value of Work

Presider

• Janet Xu, Stanford University

Individual Presentations

• Bias In, Symbolic Compliance Out? GPT’s Reliance on Gender and Race in Strategic Evaluations - Tristan L. Botelho, Yale University; Iris Wang

• Coercion is All You Need? The Introduction of Automation Technology to the Tech Workplace - Emily Mazo, Columbia University

• Humans vs. AI or Women vs. AI? Gender, Task Type, and Influence - Malissa Alinor, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Ashley Harrell, Duke University

• Same Threat, Different Futures: Diverse Professional Responses to Anticipated AI Encroachment - Farnam Mohebi, University of California, Berkeley; Ambar La Forgia; Eliza Brown, University of California, Berkeley

• Work Autonomy in the Age of AI - Isabelle Langrock, Middlebury College; Lauren Clingan, Sciences Po; Jen Schradie, Sciences Po - Paris

Session Organizers

• Janet Xu, Stanford University

• Sigrid Willa Luhr, University of Illinois-Chicago