AI and the future of social science research: exploring our epistemic responsibilities
6 May 2026
12:30 -14:00
Times are shown in local time
Open to: All
Room W4.05 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Organisational Theory and Information Systems seminar
Speaker: Professor Kevin Corley, Imperial College London
About the seminar topic
In this talk, I examine how artificial intelligence is transforming the research methods and professional communities of social science, with particular attention to business school scholarship. But what if AI is not the disruption we should be worried about – but simply the mirror that has finally made the real threat visible? I will explore how the rise of AI systems in scientific research is doing 2 things at once. It is exposing problems that have been quietly broken in academic research for decades: peer review that the most experienced scholars don’t have time for, journals that nobody really reads, and career incentives that reward more rather than better. And it is simultaneously creating new problems we are just beginning to grasp: writing that races ahead of understanding, a rapidly crumbling apprenticeship pipeline, and an entire system of trust that was built for human authors but is now confronting non-human ones. I close the talk by inviting reflection and discussion on what would be required to fix what AI has revealed, rather than to use AI to produce more of what was already broken.
Speaker bio
Kevin Corley (PhD, Penn State) is Professor and Department Head in the department of Management & Entrepreneurship in the Business School at Imperial College London. His expertise lies in the understanding of how individuals and organisations approach change, and how leaders can use times of uncertainty and ambiguity to the benefit of their organisation and followers. He is widely published in the field’s top journals on issues related to organisational change, identity and culture, as well as qualitative research methods and theory development. Kevin has won multiple professional awards, including the 2022 Distinguished Scholar for the Management & Organizational Cognition division of the Academy of Management. He has served as an Associate Editor for qualitative research at Academy of Management Journal and is currently co-leading (with Tima Bansal) a special call for qualitative research at Journal of Management. He has a forthcoming methods book with Charlotte Cloutier and Ann Langley entitled How to Design, Write and Publish Qualitative Research for Insight and Impact (Elgar Publishers).
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.