Shaping the future of physical work: developing new approaches for future making

Join our Organisational Theory and Information Systems seminar

Speaker: Professor Kristina Lauche, Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University

About the seminar topic

Current working conditions not only take a heavy toll on individual workers, but also have a negative impact on the economy and society as a whole. Caring for patients, installing heat pumps, building new homes – physical work is crucial to tackling the societal challenges facing our country. Yet this work is often physically demanding, unattractive and sometimes even exploitative. The growing labour shortage is just one example of how the resulting challenges threaten our overall prosperity. Previous efforts to help those who carry out this essential work have been fragmented, slow and largely unsuccessful.

Next to examples from current pilot projects in nursing, manufacturing and construction, the talk will address the implications for the roles of social science and our research methods. For decades, social scientists have been identifying the negative effects of technology on workers’ well-being – always retrospectively. This transdisciplinary approach seeks to step outside our comfort zone and develop new methodologies to explore possible futures and to work with workers, technicians and designers to create impact.

The talk will introduce a new transdisciplinary research programme that focuses on innovative solutions for human-centred physical work. It brings together robotics experts, designers, social and organisational scientists, and philosophers from four Dutch universities. They will work with public and private partners to jointly develop technical, social and organisational innovations with and for workers.

Speaker bio

Kristina Lauche is the chair of Organizational Development and Design at Nijmegen School of Management, Radboud University. Previously, she held research and teaching positions at the University of Munich, ETH Zurich, University of Aberdeen, and Delft University of Technology. Her research draws on practice approaches to understand how people address complex problems that require inter-organisational collaboration and how they engage in issue selling to pursue organisational or field-level change. She has investigated such processes in the context of new product development, sustainability, healthcare and creative industries. Her work has been published in journals such as Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, Organization Studies, and MIS Quarterly.

Register

No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.