Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

The ‘ideal worker’ has been subject to organization research for many years in a quest to understand this prototypical employee who is ‘always on’ (Peters & Blomme, 2019). Prior research has identified the key features that distinguish ideal workers, such as high degrees of availability and connectivity (Huws, 2016), flexibility, empowerment and commitment (Kossek et al., 2021). Ideal workers are further expected to adopt an entrepreneurial attitude (Paltrinieri, 2017) that generates an efficient and productive work organization in multiple times and places (Brumley & St George, 2022). Other studies have sought to explain how and why ideal workers are created. They suggest that workers may internalize expectations to engage in work and consequently accept work intensification in exchange for greater autonomy over when and where they work (Kelliher & Anderson, 2010). In fact, workers with the greatest autonomy have been found to work the longest and hardest (Mazmanian et al., 2013; Duxbury et al., 2014). Some authors argue that this is motivated by the need to remain visible at a distance (Leonardi & Treem, 2020) and distinguish oneself from others (Hartner-Tiefenthaler et al., 2021). Research has also highlighted the potential physical and psycho-social risks to the ideal worker’s health and wellbeing, which have been found to be gendered (Batram-Zandvoort et al., 2024).
 
In addition, digital technologies have been established as central to construing the ideal worker as available, connected and (potentially) monitored (see Manley & Williams, 2022) by peers and organization. Even though digital literacy is essential for ideal workers (Huws, 2016), a recent rise in new technologies (Hesselbarth et al., 2024) pushes the status of digital technologies from the tools that facilitate work to those which complement or even replace human work, calling for new understanding of human-computer interactions (see Chen & Chan, 2024). More fundamentally, technology mediates and structures relationships between people (Haraway, 1991). Nowadays, the emerging technologies ranging from artificial intelligence, blockchain, smart manufacturing to augmented reality, appear to augur what might be called a ‘technological turn’ that potentially affects all spheres of social activity. Yet, this increased social presence in the digital world is perhaps most conspicuously salient in the context of work, as employees experience co-existence in both physical and digital spaces (Hanzis & Hallo, 2014), the access to which is facilitated and encouraged by organizations to the point that the boundaries between social and digital start to blur: (paradoxically) technology becomes more difficult to perceive due to its ubiquity (Floridi et al., 2018). Such a new working context not only impacts what employees do at work but also, how, when and where they work (Bailey et al., 2019).
 
Extant research also shows how digital technologies facilitating hybrid work may blur the notion of working time, working space while also redefining collaboration through emerging forms of (co-)presence (Hesselbarth et al., 2024). More broadly, information systems are increasingly designed to ease the development of algorithmic management and of big data that feed artificial intelligence tools (Leonardi, 2021). In turn, new forms of managerial, peer- and self-control that are encouraged by a ‘virtual panopticon’, which digital technologies provide (see Kellogg et al., 2020; Willems & Hafermalz, 2021), may appear to further affect social relations at work (Ajzen & Taskin, 2021) and provoke workers’ feelings of dispossession (Krzywdzinski et al., 2024) or de-humanization (see Taskin et al., 2024).
 
Post-humanist perspectives thus call for de-centring the human subject and positioning it alongside non-humans instead, in order (among other considerations) to be able to better comprehend the relationship between individual and work and how the construal of the latter is changing (de Vaujany et al., 2024). Therefore, although technology permeates the social “transforming workers into ‘cyborgs’ by extending them through artificial intelligence, smart devices, and online networks” (EGOS, 2026) this process, crucially, involves a relation between human and non-human actors (Latour, 2005), in which (in the spirit of a relational ontology) both sides partake. In this call for submissions, we are especially interested in exploring the employee, team, managerial and organizational ‘contributions’ to this more-than-human ensemble in which work straddles across the (increasingly untenable) division between the digital and the social. Since digital technologies play a critical role in remote and hybrid work arrangements, the rapid technological advances in Artificial Intelligence, among others, provide fertile ground for interrogating the ideal worker from a more-than-human perspective.
 
These ongoing technological developments and the increased use of remote and hybrid working arrangements during and after the Covid-19 pandemic have raised pertinent new questions about the meanings, norms and expectations surrounding the ideal worker, the work practices adopted by ideal workers, and the technologies and management techniques used in generating ideal workers.
 
In the spirit of critically exploring the processes and practices by which new ideal workers norms emerge along the human-computer interaction, we invite contributions exploring the following themes:
 
Individual-level analyzes, including

• Human-computer interactions and their implications for:

  • work-life balance and wellbeing (including mental and physical health)

  • attitudes towards work (e.g., [dis-]engagement, de-humanization, dispossession)

  • job requirements and skills (including resilience, up- and re-skilling)

• Subjectification processes that lead to the development of individual sets of norms shaping working hours, work intensity, outputs, etc.

• Strategies by which workers challenge and reject the expectations surrounding the ideal worker

• Technology mediation, facilitation and/or interference with the emergence of ideal worker

 
Group-level analyzes, including

• The implications of advanced digital technologies for:

  • collective work (incl. co-presence, collaboration, coordination)

  • working relationships and working communities

  • managerial work (e.g., extensification, algorithmic management)

  • inclusion at work

• Collective shaping processes of the new ideal worker in a technology-mediated work context

• Generational and gender differences in workers’ response to ideal worker norms

 
Organization-level analyzes, including

• The systems and processes underpinning the shaping of the new ideal worker

• The implications of algorithmic management on developing ideal worker norms (e.g., evolution of the control-autonomy paradox)

• The implications of technology-mediated work on working time and space

 
We also invite holistic analyzes that critically explore the dynamics across levels. We encourage conceptual contributions, empirical research using innovative methodological approaches, interdisciplinary work (especially sociological and/or technology and innovation angles) as well as contributions aiming to investigate how technology can be considered as a researcher’s ally supporting their studies of the shaping of ideal workers, or the methodological implications for studying work from the post-humanist perspective that could shed light on – so far – obscured aspects of ‘ideal worker’.
 

References

• Ajzen, M., & Taskin, L. (2021): “The re-regulation of working communities and relationships in the context of flexwork: A spacing identity approach.” Information and Organization, 31 (4), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2021.100364.

• Bailey, D., Faraj, S., Hinds, P., von Krogh, G., & Leonardi, P. (2019): “Special Issue of Organization Science: Emerging Technologies and Organizing.” Organization Science, 30 (3), 642–646.

• Batram-Zantvoort, S., Wandschneider, L., Niehues, V., Razum, O., & Miani C. (2022): “Maternal self-conception and mental wellbeing during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. A qualitative interview study through the lens of ‘intensive mothering’ and ‘ideal worker’ ideology.” Stephanie Batram-Zantvoort.” Frontiers in Global Women’s Health, 3, https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/global-womens-health/articles/10.3389/fgwh.2022.878723/full.

• Brumley, K.M., & St. George, M.E. (2022): “Rules of engagement: Flexplace and ideal workers.” Social Currents, 9 (6), 573–591.

• Chen, Z., & Chan, J. (2024): “Large Language Model in Creative Work: The Role of Collaboration Modality and User Expertise.” Management Science, 70 (12), 9101–9117.

• de Vaujany, F.-X., Gherardi, S., Silva, P. (2024): Organization Studies and Posthumanism Towards a More-than-Human World. New York: Routledge.

• Duxbury, L., Higgins, C., Smart, R., & Stevenson, M. (2014): “Mobile technology and boundary permeability.” British Journal of Management, 25 (3), 570–588.

• Floridi, L., Cowls, J., Beltrametti, M., Chatila, R., Chazerand, P., Dignum, V., Luetge, C., Madelin, R., Pagallo, U., Rossi, F., Schafer, B., Valcke, P., & Vayena, E. (2018): “AI4People – An ethical framework for a good AI society: Opportunities, risks, principles, and recommendations.” Minds & Machines, 28 (4), 689–707.

• Hanzis, A., & Hallo, L. (2024): “The Experiences and Views of Employees on Hybrid Ways of Working.” Administrative Sciences, 14 (10), 263.

• Haraway, D. (1991): “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In: D. Haraway: Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 149–181.

• Hartner-Tiefenthaler, M., Goisauf, M., Gerdenitsch, C., & Koeszegi, S. (2021): “Remote working in a public bureaucracy: Redeveloping practices of managerial control when out of sight.” Frontiers in Psychology, 12 (1), 1–12.

• Hesselbarth, Y., Alfes K., & Festing, M. (2024): “Understanding technology-driven work arrangements from a complexity perspective: a systematic literature review and an agenda for future research.” The International Journal of Human Resource Management, 35 (5), 964–1006.

• Huws, U. (2016): “Logged labour: a new paradigm of work organisation?” Work Organisation, Labour & Globalisation, 10 (1), 7–26.

• Kelliher, C., & Anderson, D. (2010): “Doing more with less? Flexible working practices and the intensification of work.” Human Relations, 63 (1), 83–106.

• Kellogg, K.C., Valentine, M.A., & Christin, A. (2020): “Algorithms at Work: The New Contested Terrain of Control.” Academy of Management Annals, 14 (1), 366–410.

• Kossek, E., Perrigino, M., & Gouden Rock, A. (2021): “From ideal workers to ideal work for all: A 50-year review integrating careers and work-family research with a future research agenda.” Journal of Vocational Behavior, 126, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jvb.2020.103504.

• Krzywdzinski, M., Schneiß, D., & Sperling, A. (2024): “Between control and participation: The politics of algorithmic management.” New Technology, Work and Employment, 40 (1), 60–80.

• Latour, B. (2005): Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

• Leonardi, P. (2021): “COVID-19 and the New Technologies of Organizing: Digital Exhaust, Digital Footprints, and Artificial Intelligence in the Wake of Remote Work.” Journal of Management Studies, 58 (1), 249–253.

• Leonardi, P., & Treem, J. (2020): “Behavioral Visibility: A new paradigm for organization studies in the age of digitization, digitalization, and datafication.” Organization Studies, 41 (12), 1601–1625.

• Manley, A., & Williams, S. (2022): “‘We’re not run on Numbers, We’re People, We’re Emotional People’: Exploring the experiences and lived consequences of emerging technologies, organizational surveillance and control among elite professionals.” Organization, 29 (4), 692–713.

• Mazmanian, M., Orlikowski, W.J., & Yates, J. (2013): “The autonomy paradox: The implications of mobile email devices for knowledge professionals.” Organization Science, 24 (5), 1337–1357.

• Paltrienieri, L. (2017): “Managing subjectivity: Neoliberalism, human capital and empowerment.” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 10 (4), 459–471.

• Peters, P., & Blomme, R.J. (2019): “Forget about ‘the ideal worker’: A theoretical contribution to the debate on flexible workplace designs, work/life conflict, and opportunities for gender equality.” Business Horizons, 62 (5), 603–613.

• Taskin, L., Klinksiek, I., & Ajzen, M. (2024): “Re‐humanising management through co‐presence: Lessons from enforced telework during the second wave of Covid‐19.” New Technology, Work and Employment, 39 (1), 143–167.

• Willems, T., & Hafermalz, E. (2021): “Distributed seeing: Algorithms and the reconfiguration of the workplace, a case of ‘automated’ trading.” Information and Organization, 31 (4), https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2021.100376.