The 17th CNoW Workshop
EXPLORING CRITICAL CHALLENGES FOR THE CHANGING NATURE OF WORK
Sunday the 14th June from 9.30 – 13.30 ECIS 2026, Milan, Italy
Agenda:
09:30 – 09:45 Opening
09:45 - 10:30 Keynote
Beyond the Individual - Establishing Collective Voice in AI-Transformed Work:
from Sociotechnical Reversal to STAIR: Live Evidence of Collective Reflection Across Professional Boundaries
Louise Harder Fischer,
Associate Professor, IT University of Copenhagen | Executive Board Member, SIG-CNOW
10:30 - 10:45 Break
10:45 - 12:45 Roundtable Paper Discussions.
Find papers here. They are listed by their number.
Roundtable A
Paper 1. Tatjana Hödl & Josephine Moritz Equal Access, Unequal Outcomes: Gender-Specific Challenges on Online Labor Platforms
Paper 4. Nicola Bjerg Ens Financially Priceless: Exploring Child-Centred Content Creation
Paper 10. Tung Bui, Souren Paul & Jim Spohrer From AI Adoption to Epistemic Governance: A Sociotechnical View of the Future of Work
Paper 11. Chiara Isabella Di Rubbo Leadership Under Epistemic Uncertainty
Roundtable B
Paper 2. Sandra Ebojoh & Karin Högberg Leadership and Cultural Evolution in Hybrid Workplaces
Paper 3. Neeraja Mathavu & Leonie Manzke Working Smarter or Losing Skills? How Artificial Intelligence Use Affects Skill Levels of Knowledge Workers
Paper 7. Atif Sarwar, Jingqi Zhu, Emma Forsgren, Emma Gritt & Shenghao Xie GenAI-Driven Reconfiguration of Professional Expertise as Epistemic Expertise
Paper 8. Aslı Sencer & Selcan Yüksel From Efficiency to Capability Development: Assessing AI-Enabled Work Transformation in SMEs
Roundtable C
Paper 5. Larissa Pomrehn & Sascha Löbner Extending the Technostress Trifecta to Generative Artificial Intelligence Use in Organizations: A Theoretical Reconceptualization
Paper 6. Rachele Contiero, Alessandra Lazazzara, Vera Lomazzi & Silvia Gilardi Quantifying Workplace Stress: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Wearable Technologies in Organizational Contexts
Paper 9. Baian Al Dalham, Emma Gritt & Emma Forsgren Dialectics of Digital Work: Negotiating Digital Taylorism and Worker Autonomy
Paper 12. Livia Norström & Helena Vallo Hult Meaningfulness and Relational Dimensions in Digital Work: A Concept Driven Literature Review
12:45 - 13:15 Interactive Activity
13:15 - 13:30 Closing
We are looking forward to seeing you all.
Organizing Committee
Louise Harder Fischer, IT-University of Copenhagen, Louf@itu.dk
Emma Forsgren, Leeds University Business School, e.forsgren@leeds.ac.uk
Pauline Weritz, University of Twente, p.weritz@utwente.nl
Emma Gritt, Leeds University Business School, e.l.j.dunkerley@leeds.ac.uk
Joschka Hüllmann, University of Twente, j.huellmann@utwente.nl
Helena Vallo Hult, University West, helena.vallo-hult@hv.se
Thank to the Program committee:
Jeroen Meijerink - University of Twente
Bayu Nuswantoro - University of Marburg
Maren Gierlich-Joas - Copenhagen Business School
Tomislav Karacic - LSE London School of Economics
Miriam Klöpper - Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Atif Sarwar - University of Liverpool
Stan Karanasios - University of Queensland
Nicola Ens - IT-University of Copenhagen
Sanna Marttila - IT-University of Copenhagen
Cancan Wang - IT-University of Copenhagen
Hanne Westh - IT-University of Copenhagen
More on the keynote:
Generative AI is reshaping work faster than most organizations can govern it. Strategies map the terrain. Governance documents set the rules. But between policy and everyday practice lies a critical organizational space that remains largely unattended: the space where roles are renegotiated, professional identities contested, and accountability blurred.
This keynote traces both a theoretical and a practical journey.
In 2023, Fischer, Wunderlich & Baskerville theorized the sociotechnical reversal: the inversion of the classical ideal in which AI no longer adapts to the social system, but increasingly pre-constructs it. The dimensions that sociotechnical theory sought to protect, namely learning, reflection, and autonomy, become datafied and individualized. Recent empirical work sharpens the urgency: AI does not reduce work, it intensifies it, quietly expanding task scope and raising expectations long before anyone has named what is happening (Ranganathan & Ye, 2026). What organizations call empowerment often turns out to be task expansion without the protective reflection that genuine agency requires.
The answer is not more strategy. It is organizational infrastructure for collective reflection.
STAIR (Sociotechnical AI-Reflection) translates fifty years of sociotechnical design tradition into a participatory methodology for co-creating locally grounded principles for AI use, pursuing both productivity and well-being. Implemented across industry, municipalities, and hospitals, STAIR demonstrates that bringing managers, employees, HR, and union representatives into shared reflection across professional boundaries is not only possible, it is necessary.
This keynote presents evidence from that ongoing work and closes with a direct invitation to the CNOW community: how do we, as a field, take responsibility for ensuring that the critical challenges of AI-enabled work are met with pragmatic, participatory solutions rather than left to the ungoverned realm?