FACULTY OF CULTURE AND SOCIETY | Seminar
Planning seminar – Sedagül Yavuz.

This thesis examines how artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes competence in organizational life and reconfigures the distribution of power, agency, and responsibility. The central research question asks: How do organizations negotiate and reconfigure competence when adapting to AI technologies, and what kinds of practices, relationships, and challenges emerge in this process? The theoretical framework builds on three strands. Research on human–AI interaction highlights the dynamics of collaboration, complementarity, and symbiosis, while also drawing attention to the tensions and limits of these partnerships. Perspectives on power and agency show how AI systems not only support but also mediate decisions, shifting authority within organisations and producing new responsibility gaps. Zuboff’s account of surveillance capitalism situates these processes in a broader political and economic order shaped by data extraction and predictive infrastructures. Actor–Network Theory provides the analytical vocabulary to trace how heterogeneous actors, human and nonhuman, are assembled, how alignments are stabilised or contested, and how organisational outcomes emerge from these networks. The thesis employs a mixed-methods design that combines surveys, interviews, and document analysis. The empirical focus spans four domains: recruitment processes in Sweden, knowledge-intensive work in academia, the invisible labour that underpins AI infrastructures, and the reconfiguration of decision-making as AI systems are integrated into organisational routines. The thesis contributes to organisation studies by reframing competence as a distributed and relational phenomenon, and by clarifying how AI redefines the interplay of agency, legitimacy, and accountability in contemporary organisations.