Digitalization can involve changes in work practices, responsibilities, expertise, and relationships between occupational groups. This may involve the introduction or use of a particular technology, such as an electronic health-record system, an AI tool, a digital platform, or an automated decision-support system. For instance, AI-supported tools in healthcare may affect professional sensemaking and the division of work between clinicians and other groups. Generative AI may reshape legal work by changing how lawyers search for, interpret, and apply legal sources, while AI-assisted coding may raise questions about software developers’ roles, expertise, and career paths. But this might also concern broader digitalization initiatives that transform how an organization understands its services, work processes, roles, or relationship with users. The development of integrated digital public services, for instance, may reshape the role of frontline professionals, including how they exercise discretion, coordinate work, and interact with citizens.
At the same time, professions and occupations are not simply recipients of digitalization. They may actively interpret, promote, adapt, resist, or reshape digital initiatives in light of their knowledge, values, professional identities, and interests. Digitalization may create new roles and forms of expertise, such as data specialists, innovation managers, or digitalization leads, while also changing the boundaries between established occupational groups. This project is interested in these reciprocal dynamics: how expertise, professional identities, responsibilities, and claims to authority are negotiated as organizations digitalize.
The project should focus on a profession or occupation with a recognizable collective basis (for example, shared education or training, credentials, a professional community, common work practices, or recognized expertise). It should also include a clear digitalization dimension. This may be a particular technology or system, but it may also be a broader, bounded digitalization initiative or organizational change process.
Suggested themes
Potential themes to explore include, but are not limited to:
- Changing expertise and work practices: How does digitalization change what counts as valuable knowledge, skills, and professional judgement within a profession or occupation?
- Professional and occupational boundaries: How does digitalization redistribute tasks, responsibilities, and authority between different professions, occupations, and organizational roles?
- Professional agency in digitalization: How do professional and occupational groups influence, interpret, adapt, promote, or resist digital systems and digitalization initiatives?
- Identity, values, and ethics: What tensions arise between professional values, such as autonomy, care, accountability, confidentiality, or quality, and new digital ways of working? How are such tensions negotiated?
- New roles and distributed expertise: How do new digital roles, such as data specialists, digitalization leads, or innovation managers, relate to established professions and occupations? How is expertise distributed among professionals, managers, IT staff, users, and digital systems?
- Digitalization as organizational change: How do broader digitalization efforts reshape an occupation’s role in an organization, its relationship with users or citizens, or its contribution to organizational services and value creation?
Preferred methods
Students are expected to identify and establish access to an empirical setting for a qualitative study (with the supervisors' support). Relevant methods may include interviews, observations, document analysis, and, where feasible, ethnographic approaches.
The project should examine a clearly bounded empirical case involving a profession or occupation and a meaningful digitalization dimension. This may concern a specific technology, system, or tool, but may also address a broader digitalization initiative or organizational change process. Possible research settings include public sector and healthcare organizations, private sector firms, or NGOs and cultural institutions.
Who is this project for?
The project can accommodate up to 2 students, working individually or as a team, from the DIGHEL and DESIGN programs.
Feel free to contact Steffen Hornemann (main supervisor) to discuss your interests or any questions.