From a Work(er) Point of View: Reinvigorating Management Research Through the Study of Work

This symposium contributes to AOM’s goal of “putting the worker front and center” by explicitly adopting a work lens to advance our knowledge of contemporary issues in management scholarship. The world of work is rapidly changing in this post-pandemic phase. This includes the growing popularity of remote work and calls for more openness and transparency. Getting work done also increasingly involves digital technologies and interactions with specialists from multiple domains. Such trends pose unique challenges—including the reconfiguration of what it means to be a manager or employee. Thus, we need research that re-grounds our understanding of how work is accomplished amidst these changes in traditional and new settings. To that end, the papers in this symposium, based on in-depth fieldwork, examine how work is done in light of changing conditions in a variety of empirical contexts. For workers, the symposium provides much-needed insight into how individuals develop connections and a sense of belonging and work collaboratively in (inter-)organizational settings increasingly digitally mediated. For managers, it showcases a range of meaningful responses to contemporary workplace challenges via structural, cultural, and technological tools. Finally, the symposium offers suggestions for advancing management research by foregrounding how the study of work raises new questions on power dynamics, social ties, expert-client relations, and organizational forms.