Magnus Mähring

Algorithmic management (AM) has become a defining feature of online labor platforms (OLPs), profoundly shaping platform workers’ control over their working conditions. Prior research has documented diverse forms of worker resistance to AM—or algoactivism—yet existing studies rest on two problematic assumptions. First, that algoactivistic practices are uniformly accessible and arise directly from workers’ perceptions of structural constraints. Second, that such practices are primarily reactive resistance broadly targeted at the OLP’s AM system. These assumptions obscure heterogeneity in workers’ motivations and resources, as well as variation in how algoactivistic practices unfold. This study develops a more textured understanding of platform workers’ algoactivism by tracing how corresponding practices emerge through situated, reflective, and resource-dependent processes. Drawing on the contested terrain lens from labor process theory, we conceptualize the interplay between OLPs and workers as an ongoing struggle over control of working conditions. We examine this struggle in the context of Uber, a widely recognized extreme case of AM. Using a computer-assisted grounded theory approach that integrates topic modeling and qualitative coding procedures across multiple data sources, we develop a process-theoretical model of how platform workers contest AM. Our model centers on three recurring dynamics—reassessing terrain, exploring opportunities for contestation, and contesting terrain through algoactivistic practices—and yields two core theoretical contributions. First, we show that worker algoactivism depends on continual terrain reassessments and uneven capacities to engage in three forms of resourcing—algorithm, market, and voice resourcing. Second, we theorize algoactivism as a heterogeneous and multi-arena phenomenon comprising self-optimizing, distancing, and confronting practices that vary in logics, targets, and durability. Together, these contributions advance a more dynamic and agentic understanding of worker algoactivism and provide actionable insights for the design and governance of platform-mediated work.

Governments increasingly engineer institutional roles dedicated to support the effective digital transformation of government and its interactions with citizens. How these roles and related digital policy advocacy evolve are important aspects of digital government. Our study specifically focuses on the role of narrative work in the establishment of the Digital Minister role and related policy advocacy. We examine a case where a governmental "outsider," previously a tech activist, was brought into national government in the official capacity of Digital Minister to advance an agenda of digital transformation and transparency. Using six years of government archival data, news articles, and publicly available archival interview transcripts, we theorize how institutional actors can enact narrative work that strengthens their legitimacy through the intertwined evolution of the role and the enactment of digital policy advocacy. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

A new class of embodied technologies, defined as software or devices that aid individuals to increase, maintain, or improve their functional capabilities, is starting to blend or even fuse human cognition with technological affordances, promising to assist and enhance the lives of individuals. These devices have started to blend or even fuse human cognition with technological affordances, creating new levels of both empowerment and dependency as their use becomes increasingly interwoven into the fabric of the user's social life. We argue that existing conceptualizations of IS use need to be extended to account for the intricate ways in which both individual identity and social interaction of users are affected through the use of these devices. Theoretical development in this context could be foundational for advancing knowledge in the future use of brain-computer interfaces and AI integration in assistive and enhancing cognitive devices. Our qualitative study focuses on users and developers of smart assistive technology and devices for communication, which provide those who cannot physically speak with the means to communicate. We present a process model of technological intimacy, contending that this novel IS use pattern is habitually in a state of adaptation with continuous coping processes in ongoing cycles of human-technology engagement.

When hybrid work is adopted, organizations must enable coordination and connection across teams that have diverse configurations and needs. We extend prior work that largely studied distributed work at the team level, to explore how organizations manage diverse hybrid configurations simultaneously. Through a nine-month qualitative case study of Tech Co, a global technology firm that implemented a fully flexible hybrid policy, we identify a set of deliberate organizational practices that functioned as flexible scaffolding for hybrid work. Further, we found that these practices were customized by teams through corresponding emergent practices. Together, the deliberate organizational and the emergent team practices formed a dynamic system that enabled coordination and connection. Our study contributes to theories of hybrid work, local adaptation, and organizational learning. We challenge the assumption that hybrid work requires standardization to be effective and instead theorize how organizations can embrace structural and actor-level variation through adaptable systems that shape to their context.

Grand challenges such as climate change, global health crises, inequality, and biodiversity loss are persistent societal concerns rather than problems with clear endpoints or definitive solutions. Rather than being “solved,” these challenges must be continually engaged, managed, and navigated over time, as progress unfolds through ongoing efforts to mobilize action and coordinate across organizational and institutional boundaries. This ongoing engagement often proceeds in the absence of shared problem definitions, agreed-upon metrics, or stable criteria for success. This symposium brings together recent research on how organizations and institutions engage grand challenges when authority is limited, evaluations are contested, and expectations shift. The papers highlight that engagement is shaped by the social and institutional processes through which effort is mobilized, legitimacy is constructed, and value is assigned. Across cases spanning corporate pledges, meta-organizations, global evaluation systems, and prosocial certifications, the papers show how actors sustain collective action by recalibrating commitments, coordinating effort, and constructing legitimacy under contestation. Together, the symposium advances a process view of organizing for grand challenges by showing how legitimacy and value are continuously negotiated when formal authority and stable evaluation criteria are absent.


How Social Activism Shapes Corporate Sustainability Pledges

Author: Yeon Woo Cho; The George Washington University

How Western Norms Shape the Recognition of Non-Western Efforts

Author: Ryosuke Yokoya; The George Washington University

Identity Work through Prosocial Certifications in Hybrid Organizations

Author: Hyeonjin Cha; Bucknell University

Meta-organizations Addressing Grand Challenges as Effort Integrating Systems

Author: John-Erik Bergkvist; Stockholm School of Economics

Author: Anna Essén; Stockholm University

Author: Magnus Mahring; Stockholm School of Economics

While the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in sustainability efforts continues to grow, dominant approaches remain narrowly focused on optimization, prediction, and control. This paper challenges the predictive/optimizing paradigm by proposing a relational perspective on AI—one that treats uncertainty not as a problem to eliminate, but as a generative space for creativity, care, and transformation. Drawing on theories of relational agency, imagination, and hope, we explore how AI can participate in co-creating more ethical, empathetic, and ecologically attuned practices. Leveraging a preexisting case of AI-driven wildlife management in India, we conduct an analysis of a possible and desirable future, demonstrating how AI's affordances might be reconfigured and expanded: from tools of surveillance and efficiency to invitations for listening, attunement, and world-making. In this reimagined mode, AI supports not only the processing of data but the emergence of stories—enabling practitioners to sense, interpret, and respond to ecological entanglements in ways that foreground more-than-human perspectives and collective vulnerability.
We contribute to the growing discourse on sustainable AI by theorizing how practices of imagination and hope can cultivate response-able agency—a form of ethical responsiveness grounded in interdependence rather than mastery. Ultimately, we call for a reorientation of AI design and governance toward practices that do not merely optimize what is, but help bring forth what could be.
•We call for moving beyond the dominant predictive/optimizing paradigm on AI for sustainability, and propose a relational perspective on AI that treats uncertainty not as a problem to eliminate, but as a generative space for creativity, care, and transformation.•Building on an existing case of the use of AI in wildlife management in India, we conduct an analysis of a possible and desirable future, demonstrating how AI’s affordances might be reconfigured and expanded: from tools of surveillance and efficiency to invitations for listening, attunement, and world-making•Employing imagination allows us to transcend the limitations of the present, inviting us to co-create with AI and the environment, and cultivating hope opens up space for acknowledging the inherent uncertainty and indeterminacy of the future. Together with ethical responsiveness, this allows for using AI to go beyond incremental solutions, and toward desirable futures, in addressing sustainability challenges•We contribute to the growing discourse on sustainable AI by theorizing how practices of imagination and hope can cultivate response-able agency—a form of ethical responsiveness grounded in interdependence rather than mastery.

This article examines sources of social capital of Syrian refugees in informal tented settlements (ITSs) in Lebanon, using the division of social capital into bonding, bridging and linking social capital. It argues that refugees in ITSs possess all three forms of social capital, with important relationships existing between the three. Based on 45 interviews with refugees, the article shows that Syrians in ITSs sometimes convert bridging social capital into bonding social capital and vice versa, often with the help of smartphones. Over time respondents have built relationships to access linking social capital and with it new opportunities for livelihoods. 1

Little is known about how division of labor and coordination unfold in partnerships addressing grand challenges, where no one has formal authority to direct efforts. This study examines how goal-frames direct the division of labor and coordination in grand challenge partnerships, leveraging longitudinal data on a Swedish-based GC-partnership with the system-level goal of transforming cancer from a deadly to a curable or chronic disease. We develop a process model of how discrete “behavioral modes” of dividing labor and coordinating efforts, with different skill-related coordination cost properties, via two behavioral mechanisms – jointholism and relational blindness – can result in deteriorating cooperation. Our model provides a behavioral foundational explanation for why grand challenge partnerships frequently fail to meet expectations and remain viable.

Increasingly, immersive digital spaces are being developed that have the potential to combine rich visualization with high computational power and access to information. Despite billions of dollars of investments in immersive digital spaces, companies have yet to realize the full benefits of using these environments, and thus far only a few online video games have retained long-term popularity. The difficulty lies in the novelty of these environments. Immersive digital spaces are different from non-immersive digital spaces (such as online forums, mailing lists, and social media) because they are characterized by spatiality, i.e., participants experience space in three dimensions, yet they are different from physical reality. Participants engage with immersive digital spaces differently from how they engage with non-immersive digital spaces, but we know little how they navigate them and how they derive meaning or value from their experiences. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a three-year qualitative study of the online science-fiction multiplayer game EVE Online. Our findings suggest that immersive digital spaces become sites of interest that participants regularly navigate and create meaning and value within when they can make sense of space, manipulate the visibility of space, and manipulate the components of space. We also provide theoretical insights about behavior in immersive digital spaces.

Both research and public discourse have recently drawn attention to the downsides of algorithmic decision-making (ADM), highlighting how it can produce biased and discriminatory outcomes and also pose threats to social justice. We address such threats that emanate from but also go beyond algorithms per se, extending to how public agencies and legal institutions respond or fail to respond to the consequences of ADM. Drawing on a case study of the use of an ADM system in public school administration, we explore the practices through which public institutions avoided engagement with the detrimental consequences of ADM, leading to injustice. We provide a conceptual model outlining how organizational ignoring practices can lead to social and institutional blackboxing of an ADM system, engendering both social and legal injustice. Our work paves the way for interdisciplinary research on the multilayered blackboxing of ADM. We also extend algorithmic injustice research to include a legal dimension and provide practical implications in the form of a legal framework for ADM in the public sector.