Dr. Anastasia V. Sergeeva is an Associate Professor at the KIN Centre for Digital Innovation, School of Business and Economics, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She holds a PhD in Management from the Graduate School of Management of St. Petersburg State University and a master’s in management from the same school. Dr. Sergeeva conducts ethnographic research and draws on theories from sociology, anthropology, and philosophy to trace what happens to work “in the wild” once novel technology is taken up. Her studies focus on identifying and explaining the unexpected consequences of technology for work, expertise and organizing. Examples of dr. Sergeeva’s ethnographies include work on social robotics in care, predictive policing, artificial intelligence for hiring, surgical robots, machine learning in agriculture, and others. Her work has received “Best paper awards” from the Academy of Management and the International Conference on Information Systems. Dr. Sergeeva is a Senior Editor at Organization Science.

Robots in our midst: an ethnographer in the new world of work 

What do robots mean for the future of work and humanity? While much of the public imagination is captured by the images of anthropomorphic and increasingly more capable robots, the situated accounts of robots at work reveal a radically different picture. Drawing on post phenomenological theory and ethnographies of robots in surgery, hospitality, and elderly care, I trace how, instead of automation, robots result in subtle reconfigurations of work, that change how bodies move, practices are performed, and values are enacted. I argue that following “robots in the wild” and suspending theoretical assumptions of separation between humans and technology allows us to appreciate how robots become a domesticated part of the ongoing flow of practice. The reality of contemporary workplaces is thus the one where robots are less glamorous, but paradoxically no less consequential, as the ways in which work gets reconfigured remain unnoticed and unaccounted for.