About

Professor Beth Bechky is the Stephen G. Newberry Chair in Leadership at UC Davis Graduate School of Management. She earned her Ph.D. in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from Stanford University in 1999, along with a Master of Arts in Sociology from Stanford and a Bachelor of Science with honors in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University. Her research expertise focuses on the future of work, occupations and professions, and collaboration. As an organizational ethnographer, her work reveals the technical complexity of the modern workplace, exploring how workers collaborate to solve problems, coordinate efforts, and manage technological change. Bechky’s recent book, 'Blood, Powder and Residue: How Crime Labs Translate Evidence into Proof,' published by Princeton University Press, examines the work of forensic scientists and the tensions they face in serving justice while maintaining scientific integrity. Her research includes in-depth engagement in various work environments such as crime labs, film production sets, semiconductor clean rooms, and biotech labs. She has published in prominent journals like Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Organization Science, and the American Journal of Sociology. Bechky serves as an associate editor at Administrative Science Quarterly and has held editorial roles at Organization Science and Qualitative Organizational Research. Her professional service includes serving on the council of the Organization, Occupations and Work division of the American Sociological Association from 2009-2012. She has held faculty positions at the Wharton School and New York University’s Stern School of Business, where she was the Seymour Milstein Professor of Ethics, Corporate Governance and Strategy. Recently, she was named a Microsoft Research AI & Society Fellow for 2024, supporting interdisciplinary research on how current technologies and social structures shape the future of creative work in a world of generative AI.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Psychology
• Engineering
• Computer Science
• Aesthetics
• Management science
• Mechanical engineering
• Business
• Knowledge management
• Art
• Environmental science
• Chemistry
• Cognitive science
• Data science
• Organic chemistry
• Psychoanalysis
• Social psychology
• Marketing
• Advertising

Selected publications

• Lifting the Veil on Ethnography in Entrepreneurship and Beyond

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2025-07-01

  article

  This symposium offers insights and practical guidelines for conducting ethnographic research in entrepreneurial contexts. Although scholars have long recognized the merits of ethnography as a way of explaining life in and around organizations, ethnographic studies in entrepreneurship remain scant. A panel of experts will share their best practices and

  PublisherDOI

• Exploring the Digital Undertow: How generative AI impacts social categorizations in creative work

  Organization Theory · 2024-07-01 · 12 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  This paper examines generative AI’s broader implications for the social construction of categories. Building on the Orlikowski and Scott’s concept of the ‘digital undertow’, we consider how generative AI’s influence will likely extend beyond immediate technological benefits and lead to deeper shifts in the societal structures and occupational identities constituting conventional categories. We extrapolate from emerging findings that suggest that, while generative AI improves efficiency and the average quality of a creative product, it also tends to reduce the advantages of expertise and induce a homogenization of what is creatively produced as outputs. We consider how such dynamics might play out in the specific case of the changing roles of screenwriters and studio executives within the television and film industries. With this focused thought experiment, our overall aim is to draw attention to the broader implications of change brought forth by this technological innovation.

  PublisherDOI

• Resisting the Algorithmic Management of Science: Craft and Community After Generative AI

  Administrative Science Quarterly · 2024-12-25 · 43 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  This essay in honor of ASQ's 70th volume surveys how technology-driven changes in scholarly publishing have introduced algorithmic management to organizational research. The internet greatly reduced the cost of publishing journals and prompted an orders-of-magnitude increase in the number of journals and articles while also foregrounding quantitative metrics for scholarship. Given the academic incentive system of publish or perish, the new online ecosystem has encouraged problematic practices by scholars and publishers that threaten the standards and values of organizational theory. The advent of generative artificial intelligence within this milieu is almost certain to worsen the publishing trends we have already experienced. Drawing on prior literature about the centrality of deep intellectual engagement through reading, writing, and interactions with colleagues, we propose a set of reforms to preserve the sacredness of craft and community at the core of our scholarly work.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Beyond the Buzz: Scholarly Approaches to the Study of Work

  Journal of Management Inquiry · 2024-07-25 · 5 citations

  articleOpen access

  The place of work in organization studies and management has waxed and waned. Yet, today, social and technological developments have raised again interest in the study of work and this curated discussion brings together experts in key approaches to this topic. Seven contributions have been selected to provide a panorama of what we know about work while pointing to some uncharted territories worthy of future exploration. The contributions outline the principles behind and value of systemic, contextualized, or holistic view of work and report insights on how changes in some work components reverberate in its broader ecology. We hope this curated discussion will make us more aware of the collective journey scholars have charted so far while posing new questions and opening or re-directing new avenues of inquiry.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Speaking to Those Who Know: How Experts Manage Knowledge Overlaps with Clients

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2024-07-09

  articleSenior author

  Much of economic and social life depends on experts who draw on their unique knowledge and specialized practices, many of which are invisible and obscure to clients, to make decisions and solve problems. However, experts increasingly find themselves in situations where their clients may possess similar knowledge, experiences and familiarity with expert work practices, raising questions about expert authority. Yet we know little about how experts contend with and manage overlaps in knowledge with their clients, and with what consequences. In this paper, we inductively study the work of two equity research analyst teams who serve large institutional investors. By tracing their work over a decade through approximately 680 reports covering the same 5 publicly-traded firms, we found that these groups varied in what we call their “relational stances” toward clients, which held important consequences for how they articulated and framed their valuation practices. While one group sought to differentiate its expertise from clients and framed its practices as conceptually superior, the other accommodated and mirrored client preferences while framing practices as pragmatic solutions to specific market contexts and challenges. These differences led the two groups to adopt different trajectories of practice change which varied in how they introduced, adopted and used valuation methods across the same set of companies.

  PublisherDOI

• ScholarOne - BEYOND THE BUZZ: SCHOLARLY APPROACHES TO THE STUDY OF WORK

  2024-04-09

  preprintOpen access

  The place of work in organization studies and management has waxed and waned. Yet, today, social and technological developments have raised again interest in the study of work and this curated discussion brings together experts in key approaches to this topic. Seven contributions have been selected to provide a panorama of what we know about work while pointing to some uncharted territories worthy of future exploration. The contributions outline the principles behind and value of systemic, contextualized, or holistic view of work and report insights on how changes in some work components reverberate in its broader ecology. We hope this curated discussion will make us more aware of the collective journey scholars have charted so far while posing new questions and opening or re-directing new avenues of inquiry.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Authenticity and Individuation in the Digital Era: Technology, Authenticity, and Occupational Work

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Aesthetics
  • Psychology

  With the increased prevalence of work from home arrangements, and the decline of long-term stable employment, collective norms and conventions that once provided guidance and structure for how work should be structured and who workers should strive to become are weakening. People increasingly expect and are expected to craft their own work selves and career paths, individually and authentically. Simultaneously, ubiquitous digital technology and social media platforms enable and encourage workers to make themselves and their trajectories more visible and knowable to others (i.e., employers, peers, clients). These conditions, together with a broader cultural shift towards individuation, have led to the increased significance of authenticity and individuation in contemporary work, giving rise to new occupational groups, and putting the workers front and center (AOM 2023 theme). However, it is not clear how workers experience and navigate these new expectations in the wake of digital technologies and social media platforms, and how they take on the responsibility of crafting their day-to-day work selves and lives (almost) from scratch, while keeping the results acceptable and desirable to the occupational and organizational communities that they depend on. The papers presented in this symposium and the following discussion aim to spark scholarly conversation about the implications of contemporary occupational dynamics characterized by individuation and technologically enabled visibility and offer actionable insights for workers and managers. Creating Yourself Together: The Construction and Enactment of Self in Creative Work Author: Patrick Reilly; U. of British Columbia The Authenticity Mandate and the Ideal of Enterprising Self Author: Farnaz Ghaedipour; Stanford U. Author: Arvind Karunakaran; Stanford U. Soulfulness: Divider of Work Between Humans and Machines Author: Kevin Woojin Lee; U. of British Columbia Moving Up by Moving Around? Career Distinctiveness, Organizational Advancement, and Inequality Author: Sharon Koppman; U. of California, Irvine Author: Tingting Nian; - Author: Ming De Leung; U. of California, Irvine Author: Richard Lu; U. of California, Berkeley

  PublisherDOI

• Essence, Silence, Vitality: The Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Professional and Occupational Work

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  Professions and occupations are animated by moral concerns in relation to their practice, because these communities profess to serve society. These communities are also uniquely positioned to engage with, and may be forced to contend with, moral quandaries emerging from their embeddedness in organizations and environments presenting multiple and conflicting values. In this symposium, we bring together scholars in an interactive discussion of (1) how to conceptualize morality in professional and occupational studies; (2) the panelists’ conceptual contributions based on their work; (3) the complexity of studying morality in organizations and professions (4) methodological approaches for engaging with these issues.

  PublisherDOI

• From a Work(er) Point of View: Reinvigorating Management Research Through the Study of Work

  Academy of Management Proceedings · 2023-07-24

  article

  This symposium contributes to AOM’s goal of “putting the worker front and center” by explicitly adopting a work lens to advance our knowledge of contemporary issues in management scholarship. The world of work is rapidly changing in this post-pandemic phase. This includes the growing popularity of remote work and calls for more openness and transparency. Getting work done also increasingly involves digital technologies and interactions with specialists from multiple domains. Such trends pose unique challenges—including the reconfiguration of what it means to be a manager or employee. Thus, we need research that re-grounds our understanding of how work is accomplished amidst these changes in traditional and new settings. To that end, the papers in this symposium, based on in-depth fieldwork, examine how work is done in light of changing conditions in a variety of empirical contexts. For workers, the symposium provides much-needed insight into how individuals develop connections and a sense of belonging and work collaboratively in (inter-)organizational settings increasingly digitally mediated. For managers, it showcases a range of meaningful responses to contemporary workplace challenges via structural, cultural, and technological tools. Finally, the symposium offers suggestions for advancing management research by foregrounding how the study of work raises new questions on power dynamics, social ties, expert-client relations, and organizational forms. Power to the People? An Ethnography of Physician-Patient Interactions in the Digital Age Author: Anastasia Sergeeva; Vrije U. Amsterdam Sustaining Cross-Domain Collaboration via Articulation Work Author: Pedro Monteiro; Copenhagen Business School Distance Perceived: How Organizational Work Builds Social Connections Author: Jennifer Rhymer; UCL School of Management Power at Work: An Ethnographic Study of Digital Innovation in Cloud Ecosystems Author: Greetje Frankje Corporaal; U. of Oxford

  PublisherDOI

• “Collaborating” with AI: Taking a System View to Explore the Future of Work

  Organization Science · 2023 · 288 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Sociology
  • Knowledge management

  In the wake of media hype about artificial intelligence (AI)/human collaboration, organizations are investing considerable resources into developing and using AI. In this paper, we draw on theories of technology in organizations to frame new directions for the study of what it means to work “with” AI. Drawing on prior literature, we consider how interactions between users and AI might unfold through theoretical lenses which cast technology as a tool and as a medium. Reflecting on how AI technologies diverge from technologies studied in the past, we propose a new perspective, which considers technology as a counterpart in a system of work that includes its design, implementation, and use. This perspective encourages developing a grounded understanding of how AI intersects with work, and therefore ethnography, building on thick descriptions, is an apt approach. We argue that relational ethnographic approaches can assist organization theorists in navigating the methodological challenges of taking a counterpart perspective and propose several strategies for future research. Funding: The research was partially funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 951735.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Karl E. Weick

  20 shared

• Kathleen M. Sutcliffe

  Johns Hopkins Medicine

  10 shared

• Siobhán O’Mahony

  8 shared

• Ian Colville

  8 shared

• Timothy J. Vogus

  Vanderbilt University

  6 shared

• Gerardo A. Okhuysen

  University of California, Irvine

  6 shared

• Sally Maitlis

  6 shared

• Arvind Karunakaran

  Stanford University

  5 shared

Awards & honors

• Microsoft Research AI & Society Fellow for 2024