Seminar in presence

Building BL26 – Room 0.19 (ground floor)
Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering
Via R. Lambruschini 4/B, 20156 Milano

Jette Ernst
Roskilde University, Denmark

Abstract:

The presentation draws from a study that addresses the increasing use of robots in the hospital sector. It is based on a fine-grained ethnographic study on how work is performed by medical laboratory scientists and robots in a hospital laboratory that is automated with a range of different robots. An embodiment approach will be forwarded, using the concept of intertwinement by Merleau-Ponty in combination with concepts of affordances and complementarity inspired by Gibson. Through three examples, the presentation will demonstrate how laboratory tasks are performed in narrow and wide intertwinements between one or more staff and one or more robots. In these intertwinements human staff and robots perform complementary tasks. This happens in an asymmetrical manner because the staff must continuously activate or hinder the deactivation of the robots’ affordances. It will be used the notion of broad and narrow intertwinements to show how complexity rises when several humans and robots come together in the performance of particular tasks. Staff’s complementary practices depend on a mix of their socialised professional and sensory skills for perception and action but also on skills and knowledge developed in the intertwinement with robots and other staff.

Jette Ernst is Associate Professor in organization and leadership at the Department of Social Science and Business at Roskilde University, Denmark. Most of her ongoing work concerns organizational change in the hospital sector. She focuses, in particular, on how robots and new digital tools change work, the social dynamics of work, and professional identities. She has published articles in journals such as Organization Studies, Sociology of Health and Illness, Public Management Review and Journal of Professions and Organization.

Please click here to register.