Talking Shop: Worker Voice and Representation in the Digital Age

Abstract

This dissertation analyzes how frontline worker interests can be both included and affected throughout the lifecycle of intelligent technologies (e.g., AI-enabled sensors, robotics, and analytics), with a particular focus on the role of third-party technology vendors. By drawing on a 31-month ethnographic study of a digital production monitoring technology used by manufacturing firms, I examine the barriers, facilitators, and processes that guide how frontline workers are considered during technology design, development, and deployment. In Chapter 1, I focus on technology use inside one small manufacturing firm to study when and how worker input can be included in the ongoing design of advanced technologies in the workplace. My findings highlight how a change in the vendor’s product development strategy (i.e., from top-down to user-centered) reconfigured role relations between workers, managers, and vendor representatives and subsequently influenced worker voice and involvement in technology design. In Chapter 2, I directly study the vendor’s development processes, and I address why and how vendors may establish a pro-worker focus during development. I advance the concept of technology design ideologies—which I define as developers’ beliefs about the functions and broader purpose of their technologies—and I show how developers used institutional work practices to influence their company’s existing design ideology in ways that made it more centrally concerned with the effects of the technology on machine operators’ jobs. In Chapter 3, I focus on the vendor’s creation and delivery of self-directed online learning tools as new technology features were deployed. I find that the vendor’s training efforts—which were co-produced with the users themselves—did not equally serve all user types and encountered particular barriers when directed towards frontline workers, rather than managers. As a whole, this dissertation contributes to research on employee involvement in workplace technologies, social constructivist theories of technologies and organizing, and information systems research on vendors of digital, intelligent technologies.