NOMP Research Seminars Spring 2024

Recent years have seen substantial advancements in advanced digital technologies such as various forms of artificial intelligence and robotics, and the combination thereof. While the debate has focused on identifying which jobs are at risk of being automated and what skills will be demanded from the workforce in the future, this paper contributes to a recent stream of research in which the role basic human values have in relation to the foreseen changes in work. By analyzing data from the European Social Survey 2012, the paper contributes to the research by exploring how subjective wellbeing is related to values. The preliminary results indicate that when comparing occupations at high-, medium-, and low risk for automation openness to change values tends to be positively related to well-being regardless of the automatability degree of the occupations. Furthermore, a correlational analysis suggests that automatability of an occupation is negatively related to well-being and much of the effect is explained by the mean income within the occupations.

Johnny Långstedt has a PhD in the study of religions and works as the grant writer for the human and social sciences at Åbo Akademi University. His research on values is at the intersection of business and humanities, where he explores values in the work context and the cultural consequences of novel intelligent technologies.

This seminar is devoted to introducing Transforma as a new research group at MDU. Ongoing Transforma projects are presented.

Magnus Hoppe is an Associate Professor in Business Administration at Mälardalen University, Sweden. He mainly researches intelligence, entrepreneurship, and innovation. Of particular interest is the questioning of dominating perspectives and dogmatic academic positions. One stream of research concerns how entrepreneurship education can be adapted to foster competence in transformative change.

Maira Babri is an Associate Senior Lecturer at Mälardalen University since October 2023. She received her PhD at Umeå University in 2017 and worked as a senior lecturer at Örebro University between 2019 and 2023. Her work is theoretically eclectic, drawing inspiration from sociology, anthropology, psychology, feminist studies, and organization studies but is drawn together in an empirical interest in the organizing of ethicality. Her studies have been ethnographic and covered large corporations as well as SME’s. Maira’s current focus includes on the one hand, a methodological inquiry towards exploring selves as a researcher and on the other hand, the organizing of work in and following the principles of a circular economy.

Silvia Bruzzone is an Associate Professor at Mälardalen University. Her work is grounded in STS, urban studies and organisational theory. Her interests focus on environmental sustainability and crossdisciplinary research work from a sociomaterial perspective. At MDU she is engaged in several initiatives seeking to bridge sustainable transition research and education.

The roll-out of generative AI and self-learning algorithms are causing disruptions throughout all layers of society, especially those closely connected to information flows and the generation of digital products. This presentation will focus on the reception of such artificially generated works, especially as it relates to unease, uncanniness and perceptions of risk, and how these relate to various strategies of resistance, such as poisoning the well by falsifying metadata by digital artists.

Johan Eddebo is associate professor in Philosophy of Religion at Uppsala University. His research involves metaphysics, the nature of consciousness, philosophy of science, epistemology in general, as well as issues of religion and politics. The philosophy of technology and science have been important foci of his during latter years, not least relations between digitalization and propaganda.

“P -our love is the thing that fuels the light” is a hybrid, interactive experience that uses interactive fiction to explore human-AI relations. P is a hypothetical strong AI, a scripted interactive representation with which people engage in conversation. P is many things that AI is today, but in contrast, P is so openly. P is biased and faulty, not good at exact predictions, malleable, made by humans, and trained on human data. Designed with the concept of radical softness in mind, with P I want people to come close, to share intimacy with the machine, and through this expose its weaknesses and the weaknesses we all share. P thus embraces vulnerability and empathy and frames these as strengths and perhaps tools to rethink our human-AI future.

Lina Eklund is an associate professor in Human-Computer Interaction at the Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University, Sweden. Eklund’s work focuses on what happens as technology enters the intimate spheres of life. Her current projects focuses on experiences of technology mediated pregnancy experiences, and on what we call Intimate AI—what happens as AI translates our most intimate experiences. In particular she is interested in aspects of gender and sexuality in relation to these topics.

Career discourse represents a dominant frame that we use to make sense of our experiences in paid employment. Like all discourses, this has distinct material, social and psychological effects including the development and use of vocational guidance tools; career ladders and structures in organizations and our own sense of our vocational destinies or aptitudes. As a concept, the idea of career has evolved in the last 20 or so years to become something that applies mainly to individuals, focusing less and less on the relationship between careers and the social context in which paid employment occurs and from which individuals derive their understandings of their career choices. More critically, the concept fails to adequately capture the uneven and fragmented relationship which women often have with work. While there have been some recent attempts to address these issues, they remain largely unresolved both theoretically and practically.

Based on multiple life-history interviews with 27 women who attended a work-life experience coaching workshop, and observations and participation in the workshop itself, I present a reconceptualization of career using the metaphor of wayfaring. Using a process ontology which rejects the agency/structure dualism/duality, the metaphor is used to develop a number of key ideas which enable us to better understand

• the role of individual biography in how careers are enacted and understood
• how social structures are experienced in moments of interaction at particular sites
• the relationship between these moments and the individual biographies and social and historical conditions which infuse them with meaning and significance.

Penelope Dick is Professor of Organizational Psychology at Sheffield University Management School. Penny’s work can be broadly categorized as critical management and she is particularly interested in understanding the relationship between individuals and their social and institutional environments. Much of her work takes its inspiration from Michel Foucault and is thus focused on the role of power, embedded in taken-for-granted ideas and practices, in maintaining or challenging a status quo that advantages some groups relative to others. She has published in such journals as Human Relations, Organization Studies and Journal of Organizational Behavior. She has extensive editorial experience including 4 years at Personnel Review (2008-2012); Senior Associate Editor at the Journal of Management Studies (JMS) (2013-2018); Associate Editor for the EGOS journal Organization Theory (2018-2022); and currently Co-Editor-in-Chief at Human Relations.