Center for the Futures of Work, Information and Technology

The Center for the Futures of Work, Information and Technology promotes research on the interlinked transformation of work and dynamics of emerging technologies, and to translate research findings to inform practice, pedagogy and policy.

In 2018 the NSF identified the “Future of Work at the Human Technology Frontier” as one of its 10 “big ideas.” The objective of that effort is to encourage interdisciplinary research to understand how “constantly evolving technologies are actively shaping the lives of workers and how people in turn can shape those technologies.” In so doing, it aims to use those findings “to increase opportunities for workers and productivity for the American economy.”

Technology is a central focus, as its use enables and empowers certain types of work, displaces others and creates new kinds of work that were not previously possible. Information and communications technologies (ICTs) in particular have facilitated the development of new ways of working. ICTs have dramatically reduced transaction costs, making it possible to sell goods and services used and new to an entire nation and the world. ICT-enabled platforms opened the doors for contingent work that can be done by anyone with access to the Internet and some tools, providing flexibility at the cost of a lack of predictability and the protections of established modes of employment. These and other developments call out for research to document the current landscape of work and technology, to understand how work is changing and determine how best to deploy emerging technologies in order to inform policy and education.

The center provides a focal point to rally faculty across the school to advance research on the changing nature of work and to incorporate insights into new educational and outreach activities. The center provides a connecting point to industry, employers and alums and a space for researchers to share their research and turn it into value for students, employers and the broader community.

Talks

Upcoming talk: 4 December 2025 12:30–2:00 Hinds Hall 347

José L Gallegos – Department of Organization & Personnel Management,
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University

Alternative Futures for the Future of Work

Automation is reshaping work, sparking fears of job loss alongside promises of efficiency and competitiveness. In this context, unions are often portrayed as having only two options: either resist technologies that threaten employment or accept them in exchange for wage concessions. Our study demonstrates that they can follow a third path. Drawing on a longitudinal study of the Port of Rotterdam, we examine how dockworker unions navigated successive episodes of automation. Although they recognized automation as a genuine job threat, they also saw it as a potential source of improved working conditions and long-term firm viability. Moving beyond the acceptance–resistance binary, we show that unions can support the implementation of new technologies while mitigating their displacement effects through three mechanisms: setting limits on technology’s scope to preserve jobs (constraining), advancing reskilling and redeployment initiatives to keep workers complementary to new technologies (adapting), and redirecting technological capabilities into collective benefits such as shorter hours or early retirement (exapting). We conceptualize these mechanisms as affordance realignment—the process by which actors limit, condition, and repurpose what technologies can do in organizational settings. This framework highlights the role of unions as vehicles of collective agency in co-shaping the future of work.

José Luis Gallegos is a PhD candidate at the Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, currently conducting a research visit at Cornell University. A Fulbright alumnus with an MPA from the Harvard Kennedy School, his research explores how workers and unions navigate technological transitions in the workplace. In addition to his academic work, he has consulted for the International Transport Workers’ Federation on strategies for negotiating the use of AI in the port industry.

Upcoming virtual talk: 9 December 2025 1:00–2:00pm ET on Zoom

Sophia Fu – Rutgers University

Reconsidering Nonprofit Work in the Age of AI

Despite the growing adoption of artificial intelligence (AI), research on AI in the nonprofit sector remains limited. We conducted semi-structured interviews with leaders from 35 human service nonprofit organizations across six major U.S. nonprofit and tech hubs to explore how nonprofits are integrating AI into their work. While nonprofit leaders recognized AI’s potential to streamline operations and improve efficiency, they often negotiate the ethical and practical boundaries and expressed reservations about using AI in domains requiring emotional labor, compassionate communication, and authentic interpersonal relationships. These findings call for reconsiderations of human work for social impact in the AI age.

Dr. Sophia Fu (PhD, Northwestern University) is an associate professor of communication at the Rutgers University. Fu’s research advances theoretical understandings of hybrid organizing—specifically, how organizational and social actors navigate and integrate multiple, often competing elements such as goals, identities, media platforms, stakeholders, and institutional logics in their communication practices. Fu’s research has been recognized across multiple disciplines and academic associations, including the International Communication Association, National Communication Association, Academy of Management, and Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action.

Center Projects

The Future of News Work: Human-Technology Collaboration for Journalistic Research and Narrative Discovery

This project explores the future co-evolution of news work and computational tools. Journalists and news work are important to study because, even in the face of numerous challenges, news organizations remain a powerful force for keeping communities safe and healthy by providing information about events and trends to help people make better decisions about their lives. Journalism, as an information-based industry and profession, has always been impacted by new technologies, most recently by the rise of the Internet and loss of advertising revenue, as well as the long-standing tension between journalistic values and business interests. These pressures take a toll on journalistic processes and products. Some important stories are not getting told: they take too much time to discover, research, and craft into narratives, and time is increasingly in short supply. The project seeks to address these problems through a combination of fieldwork and user-centered development of interactive tools for supporting journalists in research and narrative discovery, i.e., finding the story that the data tell and interesting and relevant ways to convey that story to a reader.

This project will advance knowledge about technology and news work through field studies and user-centered development of interactive tools for supporting journalists in research and narrative discovery. The resulting technology-supported work processes will be evaluated in experiments with freelance journalists and through deployment in newsrooms. The proposed project is composed of several interwoven components, each with a specific focus, yet designed to be mutually supportive and to lead to research convergence: (1) focus on better understanding workers, their work and especially their current relationship to technology in newsrooms; (2) build and assess ways to support journalistic research, specifically finding relevant information in large document collections of different kinds, using deep learning techniques for entity extraction and coreference resolution (AllenNLP), semantic search (BERT) and common sense reasoning (COMET); and (3) build and assess ways to support narrative discovery. Resulting tools will be evaluated in field experiments and through their impacts on work examined in field studies. Both sets of tools will later be augmented by adding the ability to work on audio data. Assessment will be extended to consider alternative ways to divide tasks between human journalists and the computational tools. Running throughout the project will be work on evaluation, synthesis, dissemination of findings and tools, planning and project management.

The project is supported by an NSF grant, “The Future of News Work: Human-Technology Collaboration of Journalistic Research and Narrative Discovery”, 21-29047 (Syracuse), 21-28906 (Stevens) and 21-29020 (Columbia). The PIs are Kevin Crowston & Keren Henderson (Syracuse), Jeffrey Nickerson (Stevens) and Lydia Chilton and Mark Hansen (Columbia).

The Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines Research Coordination Network

The Work in the Age of Intelligent Machines (WAIM) Research Coordination Network (RCN) (https://waim.network/) brings together researchers working to develop the understanding needed to jointly design both sides of the human-technology frontier in work settings where people interact with intelligent machines.

Highlighted Publications

Artificial intelligence in information systems: State of the art and research roadmap (PDF)

Ågerfalk, P. J., Conboy, K., Crowston, K., Jarvenpaa, S. L., Lundström, J. Eriksson, Mikalef, P., & Ram, S.. (In Press). Artificial intelligence in information systems: State of the art and research roadmap. Communications Of The Association For Information Systems (Cais).

Communicating with the masses from isolation: What happened when local television journalists worked from home (PDF)

Henderson, K., Raheja, R., & Crowston, K.. (2022). Communicating with the masses from isolation: What happened when local television journalists worked from home. In Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences. Presented at the Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences, Virtual due to COVID.

Impacts of the Use of Machine Learning on Work Design (PDF)

Crowston, K., & Bolici, F.. (2020). Impacts of the Use of Machine Learning on Work Design. In 8th International Conference on Human-Agent Interaction. https://doi.org/10.1145/3406499.3415070

The Genie in the Bottle: Different Stakeholders, Different Interpretations of Machine Learning (PDF)

Harandi, M., Crowston, K., Jackson, C., & Østerlund, C.. (2020). The Genie in the Bottle: Different Stakeholders, Different Interpretations of Machine Learning. In Hawai’i International Conference on System Science. https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2020.719

Impacts of machine learning on work (PDF)

Crowston, K., & Bolici, F.. (2019). Impacts of machine learning on work. In Proceedings of the 52nd Hawai’i International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-52). https://doi.org/10.24251/HICSS.2019.719