Time: 9:30-11:30, 3 April 2025
Speaker: Nicky Dries is Professor in the Department of Work and Organization Studies at KU Leuven, Belgium, and in the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour at BI Norwegian Business School. At KU Leuven, she also directs the Future of Work Lab. Nicky was a Fulbright Scholar in Boston in 2012. To date, she has published more than 60 international peer-reviewed articles, two monographs, and 20 book chapters. Beyond academia, she actively engages in science communication, writing articles and commentary for business media such as Harvard Business Review and Forbes, appearing on podcasts, and featuring in the documentary The Digital Dilemma, which explores the impact of disruptive technologies on labor markets. In 2021, she was selected from more than 1,000 candidates for Belgium's first 40 under 40 list of future societal leaders. Nicky currently serves as Associate Editor of Journal of Management and sits on the editorial boards of Human Resource Management Journal, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology, and other journals. She has also long served as a reviewer for national and European research funding agencies including FWO in Belgium, NWO in the Netherlands, the Research Council of Finland, and the European Commission.
Abstract:
In this editorial published in Journal of Management, we discuss and define the phenomenon and research domain of the "future of work" and outline conceptual and empirical pathways for further research. We first briefly review different streams of future-of-work research in management and organization studies and related fields. We then elaborate the research directions we find most promising, organized around five questions: what, when, who, how, and why. Research on the future of work should clarify its assumptions about the phenomena it considers in scope, the temporalities associated with those phenomena, the actors involved and for whom the research is conducted, the methods and data used to empirically study the future, and the intended impact and imagined outcomes. We discuss how research can move beyond technological determinism, depoliticization, and presentism to open important paths for studying the near and distant future of work. We conclude with examples of specific research questions and methods.
