NOMP Research Seminars Spring 2026

In this paper I examine the dynamics of corporate-community relations when place is articulated as a commodity in extractive industry settings. Through Massey’s definition of place as a collection of trajectories and Castree’s six elements of commodification, I analyse a conflict around prospecting for vanadium in southern Sweden and show how an ‘extractive place’ was articulated and resisted through three phases of mapping, meaning-making and materialising.

Bio:

Sara Persson is a senior lecturer in Organization and Management at Mälardalen University. Her research is focused on the intersection between business and society and the political role of markets and corporations in environmental governance regimes. In her current projects she examines prospecting for critical minerals, and the implementation of circular and green public procurement.

Across many organizational settings, AI-based automation is becoming part of everyday work. This paper asks what this shift does to knowing in everyday work. How do different automation technologies reshape what organizations can know, how they come to know it, and who is authorised to decide and justify decisions. We argue that these questions cannot be answered by treating AI as a single phenomenon or by focusing only on task substitution. Instead, we introduce the concept of the epistemic machinery of work. We use it to describe how technologies can reconfigure what can be seen, decided, and justified in everyday work. Using this framework, we contrast two ideal-typical configurations of AI-based automation. RPA tends toward epistemic closure by narrowing representation to codified categories and stabilising deterministic, rule-based processing. LLM-based automation tends toward epistemic fluidity and simulation by making it easy to generate plausible summaries, explanations, and justifications, while shifting evaluative attention toward coherence and fit. In practice, these technologies are increasingly combined in hybrid arrangements. We conceptualise these as epistemic conditionality, where professional judgment becomes dependent on prior system outputs and where disagreement carries a higher burden of justification. The paper contributes a comparative framework for analysing AI as epistemic governance and its implications for pluralism, accountability, and organizational reflexivity.

Bios:
Christoffer Andersson is a postdoctoral researcher. He is interested in the epistemic effects of digital technology and the impacts of generative AI on work and organizing.

Inti Lammi is a Senior Lecturer. His research focuses on the organizational and epistemic consequences of AI, with empirical work centered on financial-sector work.

The book (will) introduces the concept of theatrical knowledge as an innovative methodological tool for qualitative social research. Through the metaphor of Ikebana, we structure the investigative process into three distinct phases: the cultivation of data through workshops, their dramaturgical organisation, and the subsequent stage presentation for disseminating the results. The text situates itself within the contemporary debate on post-qualitative and embodied methods, proposing an approach that values the affective and corporeal dimension over traditional logocentric models. A case study centred on healthcare personnel in Bergamo during the pandemic serves as an applied example (among others) that illustrates how performative techniques can process collective trauma and generate new knowledge. The book aims to provide a systematic, interdisciplinary guide for researchers interested in integrating artistic practices into social science investigation in a rigorous and original manner.

Bios:
Carmen Pellegrinelli is an academic working at the crossroads of social sciences, organization studies and theatre. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Trieste (Italy), where she studies participatory methods in healthcare AI research. In 2023, she earned her PhD from the University of Lapland for her work on collective organisational creativity. She has published several academic articles on theatre, performance, and organisational studies, offering an original theatrical perspective on the social sciences. She is the author of “Performing Ensemble Practices, Theatre, and Social Change” (Brill, 2025), an interdisciplinary study analysing the collective practices of the Italian theatre company ATIR and their contributions to social change.

Laura Lucia Parolin is a Senior Lecturer at Mälardalen University, previously an Associate Professor at Southern Denmark University. She participates in the NOMP group – New Organisation and Management Practices and the Transforma group, which focuses on sustainable technological, environmental and societal transformations. She works at the intersection of Science and Technology Studies (STS) and organisation studies, mainly with posthumanist practice theory. Her research interests lie in the entanglement of discursive-sociomaterial practices with affects, focusing on the ethical and aesthetic dimensions of work practices and organisations. She is interested in the human and non-human contributions to responsibility, sustainability, ethics, aesthetic practices, activism, queer subjectivities and postqualitative research methods.

This is a work-in-progress paper that we plan to send to ‘Work, Employment and Society’. The authors have since 2023 been part of the Up-skilling for Industry 5.0 project (https://www.upskill-horizon.eu/), and have throughout the project been Intrigued by policy makers’ and industry representatives’ voices talking about firms trying to access skills that are not (yet) there, elaborating different materials for providing lists over lists of defined future skillset, whose application and implementation might not ever happen (Frey and Osborne, 2017), and the consequent problems ahead of us due to this fact. So, we started asking questions about the contemporary industry worker: who is he/she, where does he/she come from, why is he/she there? In our multiple, cross European ethnographic studies we see that the firms do not necessarily employ people who ‘have’ the skills, but rather that they are acquired through work, and through being there, rooted in that spatiality (Gibson, 2016). To understand the skills needed in the future factory, we argue, we must besides understanding the technologies and the processes of the future, also understand the humans and the technologies that are there today. To comprehend what industry 4.0 technologies are up against when facing ‘reality’, we must listen to and act upon the clues given by the personal, embodied worker stories since such stories provide the foundation for how to approach the recruitment of skilled blue-collar workers for the future.

Bio:

Anna Uhlin is an associate senior lecturer at the Organization & Management group at MDU. Her research interests are mainly digitalization of work, work meetings, meeting practices, and the introduction and use of new technologies in work practices. The current paper is a collaboration between a group of researchers who have worked together in the EU Horizon project Up-skilling for Industry 5.0.

Up-Skilling for Industry 5.0 External link.

This paper explores how HR professionals construct and negotiate ethical issues related to AI in their everyday work. Drawing on diary material collected over multiple time points, the study uses a discursive psychology approach to examine how ethical concerns emerge, are justified, or downplayed in situated reflections. The paper contributes to understanding ethics as an ongoing, dilemmatic practice in AI-supported HR work.

Bio:

Christoffer Larsson is a PhD candidate in Business Administration at Mälardalen University. His research focuses on ethics and artificial intelligence in working life, with a particular interest in how HR professionals discursively construct responsibility, fairness, and care when using AI in everyday practice.

Klara presents the text on gender equality in academia that she has written on commission for the 2024 Government Inquiry on Gender Equality Policy. The report contains an overview of key gender equality challenges in academia, the governance of gender equality in higher education over time and its consequences, as well as a concluding discussion on possible future governance in the field of gender equality.

Bio:

Klara Regnö conducts research in the field of gender, organization, and leadership and is a senior lecturer and the Deputy Head of Department of Business and Mathematics.