About

Melissa Mazmanian is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. She holds the position of Chancellor's Fellow and serves as the Informatics Department Chair. Her research interests revolve around communication practices in personal and organizational contexts, with a focus on social norms and the nature of personal and professional time in the digital age. She conducts ethnographies of personal time, examining the role of communication theologies in how families juggle busy lives and negotiate work and personal demands. Additionally, Melissa is interested in the intersection between formal power structures and everyday practices within organizations, engaging in qualitative research on practices such as budgeting, electronic health systems, change efforts to promote predictable time off, and smartphone use in work contexts.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Social psychology
• Social Science
• Psychology
• Political Science
• Engineering
• Mathematical analysis
• Art
• Mathematics
• Economics
• Demographic economics
• Cognitive psychology
• Public relations
• Medical education

Selected publications

• Designing for Resistance: Analyzing Data Work Among Direct Service Providers

  2026-04-13 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Information systems, such as electronic health records (EHRs) and case note software, increasingly support direct service providers (DSPs) in social service administration. Previous scholarship examined how these digital interventions enhance care but also create unintended consequences for DSPs and their clients. Despite broad interest in how DSPs and other frontline social service workers utilize information technology, few studies examine how they avoid digital tools, particularly when documentation stakes are high for both clients and DSPs. We report findings from interviews with 16 DSPs, who remain keenly aware that the information they document may become visible to others now and in the future. To protect themselves and their clients, they develop practices to resist recording data in digital records such as EHRs. We offer a typology of resistant data practices and design considerations grounded in the experiences and understanding of power within the roles of DSPs.

  PublisherDOI

• Mapping Risk Work and Designing Technologies to Support it in CSCW Research

  2025-10-17

  article
  PublisherDOI

• Efficient service provider or committed social reformer?: Government data storytelling around city data projects

  Big Data & Society · 2025-07-31

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  In this study, we analyze city governments’ public presentations of their data-centered projects as a form of data storytelling and reveal how the documents adopt contrasting data presentation techniques to construct and activate two unique ideals of data-driven governance: urban service management and social reform . When reiterating the familiar narrative of data-drivenness as real-time monitoring and optimization of services, documents demonstrate accomplishments in numbers and keep most of the cities’ data work hidden from the public. In contrast, the emerging narratives of social reform suggest city governments as leaders committed to tackling structural injustices through data-driven approaches and invite the public to interrogate their data work through interactive, open-ended data visualizations. However, we argue that the increased visibility of government data and delegation of power to citizens signaled by the social reform narratives do not succeed in challenging the dominant epistemology or power hierarchy in data-driven regimes. Instead, the signaled values are leveraged to justify an ideal of entrepreneurial citizens in the documents which is still exclusionary. This finding suggests that scholars and civic societies take more nuanced approaches to demands for government transparency and accountability, as well as calls for more attention to the political effects of these mundane forms of data communication between governments and their constituents.

  PublisherDOI

• Beyond Self-Extraction: Movement Practice in Independent Work

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This study explores the interplay between autonomy and vulnerability among independent creative and professional workers, focusing on the role of movement practices. Through interviews and diary studies with 53 independent workers in the United States, we identify how bodily movement serves as both a tool for productivity enhancement and a source of personal well-being. Workers employ movement practices—such as walking, yoga, and strength training—to improve mental focus, emotional stability, and physical resilience while addressing vulnerabilities like isolation, body breakdown, and creative stagnation. These practices reflect a dual purpose: enhancing labor efficiency and offering restorative, communal, and pleasurable experiences. The findings highlight the inherent tension in movement practices as both self-extractive, driven by neoliberal productivity ideals, and transcendent, enabling connection and healing. We conclude by emphasizing the complex dynamics of independence in contemporary labor and the necessity of holistic approaches to worker well-being within precarious economic systems.

  PublisherDOI

• The Crisis of Care: A Curated Discussion

  Journal of Management Inquiry · 2025-02-25 · 9 citations

  articleOpen access

  Caregiving and career have been primarily studied by management scholars for their incompatibility. Largely ignored have been the consequences of this approach for the lives of workers. Yet the need for both childcare and eldercare is on the rise, women are increasingly integrated into the workforce, and, for many, retirement is being delayed. Particularly in the United States, workers and their families are experiencing a crisis of care. In this curated piece, we identify—and aim to dismantle—four myths that have allowed management research and practice to segment care and work. Contributors bring economics, feminist theory, sociology, organizational behavior, and careers perspectives to provide a broader vision both of the problem and of how management research might advance toward theoretical and practical solutions.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Myth of Good Data: An Ecosystem Perspective on Data Integrity Breakdown and Rehabilitation

  MIS Quarterly · 2025-09-12 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  In recent years, a huge amount of excitement has surrounded the potential to transform organizations and institutions through evidence-based or data-driven decision-making. However, such promises are often premised on a stable view of data quality. In this paper, we take a practice perspective on data integrity, asking how attempts to leverage data at one point in a data ecosystem can ripple unexpectedly, triggering a breakdown in the integrity of data resources at another point in the ecosystem. We further outline the intensive efforts involved in rehabilitating data when integrity is undermined. Through a multi-sited ethnographic study in multiple healthcare organizations, we trace four empirical examples of situated data integrity breakdown (negotiated category breakdown, category expansion breakdown, data mismatch breakdown, and data disaggregation breakdown), linking the triggers, responses, and rehabilitation efforts in each case. We argue that organizations need to take the ongoing work of retraining personnel, modifying IT systems, and/or shifting data collection practices into account to rehabilitate data whose integrity will be inevitably undermined as a result of shifting needs, goals, expectations, and/or IT systems across a connected data ecosystem. In so doing, we offer insights into the often unpredictable impacts of attempts to leverage data, thereby enriching the discourse on data-driven decision-making and its implications for organizational strategy and practice.

  PublisherDOI

• From Surviving to Thriving With Work Innovations: New Perspectives on Coping with Work & Technology

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  article

  Innovating for the future necessitates a deep theoretical understanding of how individuals cognitively and behaviorally cope with and adapt to shifting paradigms of work and rapid technological advancements. With this in mind, we offer an in-depth examination of the psychological and behavioral mechanisms underpinning how people perceive and react to emerging challenges and opportunities in the new world of work. The first presentation explores independent, creative workers, delving into their unique strategies for navigating non- traditional work structures and their adaptation in terms of both psychological orientation and physical presence. The second presentation challenges conventional views on busyness, proposing that individuals often engage in self-imposed busyness as a deliberate choice that can yield positive outcomes in terms of productivity and well-being. The third presentation introduces a relational theory of microaggressions, a phenomenon increasingly prevalent in modern work settings, and examines the perceptions and responses of individuals and the reactions of perpetrators. The fourth presentation shifts the focus to the perceptions of generative AI in the domain of advice- giving, probing into how individuals may experience the potential benefits and drawbacks of AI tools in the advice generation process. Finally, the last presentation underscores the significance of technology identification as a key factor influencing individuals’ willingness to adopt new technologies, demonstrating its role in shaping technological integration in the workplace. Collectively, these presentations will shed light on the multifaceted ways in which human actors are responding to evolving work environments and offer important insights for understanding and navigating the future of work. Self-Care/Self-Extraction: Movement Practices by Independent Workers Author: Margaret Jack; Syracuse U. School of Information Author: Melissa Mazmanian; U. of California, Irvine The Busy Bee Effect: How and Why Self-Imposed Busyness Affects Work-Related Outcomes Author: Elizabeth Nguyen Trinh; U. of Michigan, Ross School of Business Author: Laura Maria Giurge; The London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) A Relational Theory of Workplace Microaggressions Author: Basima Tewfik; MIT Sloan School of Management Author: Summer Jackson; Harvard Business School The Role of Task Order in the Evaluation of Human and AI-Generated Advice Author: Erica Bailey; Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley Identity and Technology Adoption Author: Maya J. Cratsley; U. of Southern California - Marshall School of Business Author: Nathanael Fast; U. of Southern California

  PublisherDOI

• Coding Beauty and Decoding Ugliness: The Role of Aesthetic Concerns in Programming Practices

  Science Technology & Human Values · 2024-04-15 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access

  In this article, we analyze the productive role of aesthetics in organizing technoscientific work. Specifically, we investigate how aesthetic judgments form and inform code-writing practices at a large web services company in Russia. We focus on how programmers express aesthetic judgments about code and software design in everyday practice and explore how language with positive and negative valences is deployed. We find that programmers label code as “beautiful” without defining or establishing agreement about the term and are thereby able to maintain different ideals of beauty within the same organization. However, by learning how to avoid what senior developers deem to be “ugly” code, developers become socialized into producing code with a similar style and logic that we describe as “not ugly.” The fieldwork suggests that aesthetic language can function simultaneously as a mechanism that supports professional diversity within an organization and as a tool for producing consistencies in software design. Studying manifestations of both positive and negative aesthetic language in technoscientific work provides insight into professional practices and the various roles aesthetic language can play in organizational life.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Not Just a Matter of Style: Does Aesthetics Have a Place in Software Engineering Curriculum?

  2023-05-01 · 2 citations

  article

  Aesthetic designations of code matter in how software engineers work together. Our empirical fieldwork finds that aesthetic designations are frequently used to informally assess code in the industry (i.e., code being called “beautiful,” “elegant,” “ugly,” “messy,” etc.). In this position paper, we build on our empirical fieldwork in the industry to describe the preliminary findings of a survey on students’ aesthetic attitudes toward code. To understand how aesthetics is covered in software engineering courses, we surveyed 52 B.S. and 25 M.S. software engineering students about their attitudes on how “beauty” in code manifests. Our early findings suggest that 75% of undergraduate and 86% of graduate students believe that one should always strive to write “beautiful” code. Further, 98% of graduate and 85% of undergraduate students are aware that aesthetics is an aspect of software quality. While it may be inefficient to formalize aesthetic considerations in pedagogy, we argue that aesthetic aspects of code should be made explicit in teaching code-writing skills.

  PublisherDOI

• Ethnography on Work/ Technology in the Home

  2023-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Transcript Auto scroll search expand close Search Transcript Search Up Search Down Close Search Tools Tools icon close Download PDFopens in new window Cite Cite icon close Format APA APA Chicago Harvard MLA AMA Mazmanian, M. (Academic). (2023). Ethnography on work/ technology in the home [Video]. Sage Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529669671 Mazmanian, Melissa. "Ethnography on Work/ Technology in the Home." In Sage Video. : SAGE Publications, Ltd., 2023. Video, 00:28:07. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529669671. Mazmanian, M., 2023. Ethnography on Work/ Technology in the Home, Sage Video. [Streaming Video] London: Sage Publications Ltd. Available at: <https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529669671 & gt; [Accessed 17 Mar 2023]. Mazmanian, Melissa. Ethnography on Work/ Technology in the Home. Online video clip. SAGE Video. London: SAGE Publications, Ltd., 31 Jan 2023. doi: https://doi.org/10.4135/9781529669671. 17 Mar 2023. Ethnography on Work/ Technology in the Home [Streaming video]. 2023. doi:10.4135/9781529669671. Accessed 03/17/2023 copy to clipboard or Export to your reference manager Endnote Endnote Reference Manager ProCite RefWorks BibTeX Zotero Medlars Mendeley Word Export Cancel Share Share icon close Share via Email Please log in from an authenticated institution or log into your member profile to access the email feature. Sign in/register Embed Embed icon close Embed this Content Add this content to your learning management system or webpage by copying the code below into the HTML editor on the page. Look for the words HTML or </>. Learn More about Embedding Video icon link (opens in new window) Clip - https://methods.sagepub.com/video/ethnography-on-work-technology-in-the-home Embed code: Copy to clipboard Select a length: Entire video Entire video Select a size: 420x236 640x360 853x480 Sample View: (opens in new window) Cancel Get link Get link icon close Select a length: Entire video Entire video Link to this page directly with a permalink: https://methods.sagepub.com/video/ethnography-on-work-technology-in-the-home Copy to clipboard Cancel

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Recent grants

• Examining the 'Class Ceiling' in Big Tech

  NSF · $673k · 2019–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Christine M. Beckman

  22 shared

• Gillian R. Hayes

  University of California, Irvine

  18 shared

• Lynn Dombrowski

  Georgia Institute of Technology

  13 shared

• Christina Herzog

  9 shared

• Debra J. Richardson

  9 shared

• Juliet Norton

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  9 shared

• Daniel Pargman

  9 shared

• Ankita Raturi

  Purdue University West Lafayette

  9 shared

Awards & honors

• Best Information Systems Publications Award