Descrizione

Emanuela Shaba, Ph.D., is a researcher in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, at University of Milan.
She holds a Master’s degree in Business Administration from Suffolk University in Boston, USA and a Ph.D. in Economic Sociology and Labor Studies from the University of Milan.
Her main research interests include digital technologies and their implications for work and organization. Her previous research has been published in international journals, such as Journal of Organizational Change Management, Systemic Practice and Action Research, Journal of European Management etc. More recently, she has explored research on the interaction between AI and decision-making in the workplace as also on other management topics, such as organizational collaboration, learning and innovation.
Since 2017, she has been teaching Human Resource Management, Human Resource Information Systems, Organization Design, in different university contexts and at different levels, including undergraduate and graduate programs. She is also engaged in graduate student mentorship and thesis supervision.

New ways of working, hailed as the ‘future of work’, involve entanglements between the social and the material that bring to the fore discussions around how we work, an intersection that is essential to better understand the implications of new ways of working. This monograph hence poses the question of such implications for middle managers, important social agents in the organization, as they try to ‘assemble’ different aspects of hybrid working– ‘time, space, digital technology’. Yet, exactly what hybrid working implies for their skills, function and role in the organization is currently subject to debate and experimentation. To that end, the objective of this monograph is twofold. On one side it seeks to move towards delineating a field of research on conceptualizing new ways of working by exploring the phenomenon, while on the other side it seeks to study different aspects of the implications they bring for managerial work and roles.
Through empirical analysis, given the specific environment and the multitude of objectives that each particular study of this monograph aims to satisfy, this monograph demonstrates that new ways of working play a critical role in mediating human-to-human relationships as well as collaboration and interaction, further shaping social actors’ agency, showing hence the many ways to which managerial functions and role are susceptible to the sociomateriality of work, thereby enriching the scientific dialogue on these emerging topics.