Call for Papers: EGOS - Home - European Group for Organizational Studies
Convenors: Michel Ajzen (Univ. of Namur), Michal Izak (Univ. of Chester), Stefanie Reissner (Durham Univ.)
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'.
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Michel Ajzen
Professor
University of Namur
Namur
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