PhD Research Proposal Presentation: Simon Altmejd
Simon Altmejd, a doctoral student at 91黑料网 in the area of Strategy & Organization will be presenting his research proposal entitled:
Struggling Over What鈥檚 Real: How Digital Representations Reconfigure Organizational Control
Wednesday, March 18, 2026, at 3:00pm
Student Committee Chair: Professor Samer Faraj
Please note that the presentation will be conducted in person.
ABSTRACT
In the age of intelligent technologies, blue-collar workers such as machinists, material handlers, and truck drivers increasingly work with digital representations that mediate their engagement with the physical world. This transformation in how blue-collar workers relate to the physical world reconfigures organizational control in important ways that remain only partially understood. As such, this dissertation proposal builds on a three-year ethnography of digitization in the Canadian truck transportation industry. By integrating sociological, managerial, and cybernetic lenses on the concept of control and drawing from practice theorizing, I develop a theory of control adapted to the contemporary conditions of blue-collar workers characterized by a 鈥渟truggle over what鈥檚 real鈥� between the embodied experience of work and the digitized renderings of physical labor. More specifically, I show how representational practices鈥攖he set of activities through which digital representations come to stand in for physical phenomena鈥攕hape organizational control in physically-intensive labor. In doing so, this proposal advances scholarship on digitally mediated control in two ways. First, while existing studies have placed the emphasis predominantly on the experience of workers, my study illuminates how representational practices involving both workers and managers are configured in ways that shape distinct forms of control. Second, while existing studies emphasize how digitally mediated control leads to the de-skilling of workers and a loss of expertise, I provide insights into the forms of control that support the complexification of blue-collar expertise in the age of intelligent technologies.
