The 17th CNoW Workshop
EXTENDED SUBMISSION DATE 15th MAY
EXPLORING CRITICAL CHALLENGES FOR THE CHANGING NATURE OF WORK
Sunday the 14th June from 9.30 – 13.30 ECIS 2026, Milan, Italy
(submission instructions and agenda below)
The modern workplace remains in flux due to the rapid advances in digital workplace technologies, such as generative AI, virtual and augmented reality, and people analytics. This pace of change has created dynamic workplace arrangements in which individuals and organizations face ongoing challenges, including AI adoption and appropriation, re- and upskilling, and tensions between virtual or hybrid work and return-to-office mandates. As digitalization continues to reshape work, it profoundly impacts employees’ lived experiences, connectedness, engagement, and the formation of productivity, meaning, and identity in daily work. The transformation of work also gives rise to novel forms of organizing. Human-machine configurations emerge; digital nomads work from anywhere in the world; and humans are managed by algorithms. The promised benefits include productivity gains, reduced cognitive stress, and enhanced knowledge management. However, these benefits are offset by potentially harmful effects on employees, their teams, and their organizations. Issues such as digital fatigue, diminished well-being, fears of job displacement, deteriorating training and education, or the erosion of privacy demand immediate attention. Addressing these issues is imperative for shaping the future digitization of workplaces and organizing. This workshop explores these critical dimensions of the changing nature of work. Combining short presentations with roundtable discussions, it aims to foster a meaningful exchange of ideas in an in-person setting. A keynote will stimulate our thinking and provide valuable context for the round table discussions.
Participants are invited to submit extended abstracts of up to five pages. Potential topic areas for extended abstracts include (but are not limited to):
- IT-driven restructuring of work and labour (e.g., algorithmic management, gig work)
- Ethics, sustainability, and governance of workplace technologies (e.g., privacy, dark side of AI, unintended consequences of IT)
- Digital collaboration, infrastructures, and spatial reconfiguration of work (e.g., virtual teams, metaverse, digital nomadism)
- Worker well-being and boundary management in digital work (e.g., technostress, mental health)
- Education, learning, and identity for AI-enabled workplaces (e.g., AI literacy, meaningfulness of work, job identity)
- Designing workplace technologies (e.g., nudging, gamification)
This is the 17th CNoW workshop. It began at ICIS in Milan in 2013 and has been held annually since then. We are a growing community and in 2021 we joined AIS as a Special Interest Group - the Changing Nature of Work with ICT (SIGCNoW).
We invite an audience interested in the changing nature of work and are open to different forms of research including quantitative, qualitative, computational, and conceptual work. The workshop is intended to be inclusive and welcomes participants at any seniority level and submitted works may be completed or in-progress. Attendance without submitting a paper is possible.
Submission Timeline: - 30th April - 15th May: closing of submissions.
Papers can be submitted at any time up to the deadline and are reviewed on a rolling basis.
Authors are notified accordingly on a rolling basis. Submit via email to: j.huellmann@utwente.nl
Please prefix your email subject with: “ECIS CNoW 2026 Submission”.
Joschka will confirm the receipt of each submission. Please get in touch if you don’t get a confirmation after one week.
Agenda:
09:30 – 09:45 Opening
09:45 - 10:30 Keynote by Ass. Prof. Dr. Louise Harder Fischer, see below for description.
10:30 - 10:45 Coffee Break
10:45 - 12:45 Roundtable Paper Discussions
12:45 - 13:15 Interactive Activity
13:15 - 13:30 Closing
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
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
Keynote:
Beyond the Individual: Establishing Collective Voice in the Ungoverned Socio-Technical Realm of AI Transformation
From the Sociotechnical Reversal to STAIR - Live Evidence of Collective Reflection Across Professional Boundaries
Louise Harder Fischer, Associate Professor at IT-university in Copenhagen and Executive board member of SIG-CNOW
Generative AI is reshaping work at a pace most organizations are not equipped to govern. Strategic frameworks map the terrain. Governance documents set the rules. But between strategy and everyday practice lies a critical organizational space that remains largely unattended: the socio-technical realm where roles are renegotiated, professional identities contested and accountability blurred. This keynote traces a theoretical and practical journey. In 2023, Fischer, Wunderlich & Baskerville theorized the sociotechnical reversal: the inversion of the classical sociotechnical ideal in which AI no longer adapts to the social system but increasingly pre-constructs it. Learning, reflection and autonomy, the very dimensions classical sociotechnical theory sought to protect, become datafied and individualized. Recent empirical work sharpens the urgency: AI does not reduce work, it intensifies it, expanding task scope and raising expectations in ways that accumulate silently before anyone has named them (Ranganathan & Ye, 2026). What organizations have called empowerment, 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 – aiming for both productivity and well-being. Through live implementations across industry, municipalities and hospitals, STAIR demonstrates that collective reflection across professional boundaries, convening managers, employees, HR and union representatives, is both possible and necessary.
This keynote presents evidence from that ongoing work and closes with a direct invitation to the CNOW community: how can 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?