Works
- Life in the trading zone: structuring coordination across boundaries in postbureaucratic organizations, Organization Science 17(1), 22 to 44, 2006
- Subordinate activation tactics: semi-professionals and micro-level institutional change in professional organizations, Administrative Science Quarterly 64(4), 928 to 975 (online 2018, in print 2019), 2018
- Algorithms at work: the new contested terrain of control, Academy of Management Annals 14(1), 366 to 410, 2020
In Organizational Structures
Known for
Change in professional work and occupations, and algorithmic control
Ideas
The six mechanisms of algorithmic control. With Valentine and Christin, Kellogg synthesized research on algorithms at work through labor process theory: employers use algorithms to direct workers (restricting and recommending), evaluate them (recording and rating), and discipline them (replacing and rewarding), a rational control distinct from the technical and bureaucratic control of the past century, which workers resist through tactics the authors call algoactivism. Caveat: A review that reads the field through one theoretical lens; the authors say it highlights problems with a largely positive view of algorithms at work.
Subordinate activation tactics. Managers can change professional practice by empowering semi-professionals to use their structural position toward the professionals and giving them positional tools that ease the professionals' concerns. Caveat: Two hospitals.
Trading zones. In a postbureaucratic firm, members coordinated across community boundaries through practices that made work visible and revisable, a trading zone that aided speed and learning but left jurisdictional conflict and produced rework and ambiguity. Caveat: One organization.