#AOM2022 CTO Distinguished Research: Award Winners

AOM 2022 Annual Meeting -- Best Division Paper, Winner:
Ryan Stice-Lusvardi, Pamela Hinds, & Melissa Valentine: Legitimating Illegitimate Practices: How Data Analysts Compromise Standards to Promote Quantification



Ryan, reflection on the project:
"One thing I wish I would have done differently was to pause and analyze my data more often throughout data collection. I was a full-time student at the the time, so that was tricky, but if I could do it again, I would have built in breaks throughout data collection to analyze the data, shop around emerging insights with my colleagues, and then recalibrate. I did this, but not nearly enough and the best insights I gained came from reflecting on my findings with my peers. They were able to see interesting threads that I missed because I was so immersed."
AOM 2022 Annual Meeting -- CTO DeSanctis Award:
Camille Endacott, UC Santa Barbara: Consequences of AI Agents Communicating on One’s Behalf for Impression Management




Camille, reflection on the project:
"In working on this study, I learned how important it is to consider multiple groups’ perspectives on AI - not just voluntary end users and developers, but also the people who end up using the tool because they’re communicating with someone who does! I also learned that going back to foundational texts (like Goffman’s work on impression management) can offer really generative ways of thinking about new phenomena (like AI)."


AOM 2022 Annual Meeting -- Best Student Paper:
Alan Zhang, MIT (with Wanda Orlikowski): Regenerative Coordination: Working with Algorithms to Produce Live Services



Alan, reflection on the project:
"As my first attempt at fieldwork, this study presented serious difficulties that, at the time, before taking any methods classes, I wasn’t even aware I was up against. Specifically, that I was studying a major company, one valued at several billion dollars whose work was so technically complicated and beyond my familiarity, and whose legal defenses kept it protected from media and most observers. In retrospect, I consider myself fortunate to have been clueless about this at the start, because it allowed me to go about my fieldwork relatively relaxed, at ease, and eager to learn everything I could, which made people at the company receptive to my presence. The lesson I took away from that experience is to remind myself, as often as I can, that the participants in my fieldwork are not by default as hostile or guarded as we scholars are trained to expect."
AOM 2022 Annual Meeting -- Best Student Paper:
Bomi Kim, Vrije Universiteit (with Mohammad Hosein Rezazade Mehrizi): Generating Knowledge Around the Unknowable Algorithm



Bomi, reflection on the project:
"Coming from a more positivistic tradition of research and moving into an interpretivist domain, I had to learn that different methods and data come with starkly different traits and impact how you conduct research as well as what role you play as a researcher. Firstly, I learned that there is no complete data analysis before writing. Especially if you work with ethnographic data, there will be loose ends; there is no clear boundary to be excavated from the data. However, many loose ends can be woven together in the process of writing and a clearer boundary can emerge. Secondly, in an interpretivist study, you play an active role in constructing, rather than excavating, a boundary in your data by foregrounding and backgrounding things. This role transition has been especially tough for me. One thing that helped me was realizing that doing interpretive research is less of a solitary process between you, the tool, and the data where you look for the most truthful representation - but more of a conversation between your academic and practitioner communities through which you carve out the most interesting lesson that advances our understanding on something. I think this is partly what my promoter means when she often says, 'one can never do this alone!'"


AOM 2022 Annual Meeting -- Best Published Paper, Runner Up 2:
Nicholas Berente, Bin Gu, Jan Recker, & Radhika Santhanam: Managing Artificial Intelligence (MISQ)



Nick, reflection on the paper:
"This is a conceptual article about managing artificial intelligence (AI) and we were of course challenged to really think about how managing AI is different from managing other forms of software or technology. The process taught me, first of all, how slippery the notion of AI actually is. It is not really a technology, but it is a signifier that we use to refer to a frontier of computing. Also, I learned about the tremendous tradition of scholarship there is in this domain going back 50 years. Many of the discussions about AI that we see are merely rediscoveries of notions that were established decades ago."
AOM 2022 Annual Meeting -- Best Published Paper, Winner:
Hatim A. Rahman: The Invisible Cage: Workers’ Reactivity to Opaque Algorithmic Evaluations (Administrative Science Quarterly)



Hatim, about the paper:
"As for what I learned: For decades now, the “iron cage” has dominated our understanding of control. In platform settings and the gig economy, my study suggests that the invisible cage metaphor is becoming, or arguably has already become, the dominant way to understand control. Platforms employ algorithms such that the criteria for success and changes to those criteria are unpredictable for workers and its users."


Prepared by Anand Bhardwaj (CTO Student Representative 2022-2024), Jingyao (Lydia) Li (CTO Student Representative 2022-2023),
and Yulia Litvinova (CTO Webmaster, 2022-2023).