Professor in Social Consequences of AI in Organizational Communication

The UCSB Department of Communication is recruiting for a tenure-track/tenured open rank faculty position.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is fundamentally transforming how humans communicate, coordinate, and organize across workplaces, institutions, and society. AI increasingly shapes organizational decision-making, collaboration, knowledge production, expertise, and identity while reconfiguring power, authority, accountability, and the boundaries between human and machine agency. These developments create new opportunities to revisit foundational organizational communication theories while also demanding new theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding AI as a sociotechnical actor embedded within organizational and institutional systems.

We seek a scholar who conducts innovative, theoretically grounded, and empirically rigorous research using quantitative, qualitative, or mixed-method approaches that addresses the social consequences of AI from an organizational communication perspective. This could include, but is not limited to, topics such as human-AI collaboration; algorithmic decision-making and governance; sustainability; visibility and surveillance; ethics and corporate social responsibility; power and inequality;

and (dis) empowerment of underrepresented groups. We are particularly interested in scholarship that advances organizational communication theory by examining how algorithms or algorithmic systems reshape communication processes, organizing practices, and institutional change, rather than only treating AI as a methodological or analytical tool. We anticipate that the faculty hire will make meaningful connections and engage in multidisciplinary endeavors across campus such as the Mellichamp Initiative in Mind & Machine Intelligence, the Department of Technology Management, the Center for Information Technology & Society’s research foci in AI, the Pahl Center for the Study of Critical Social Issues, and campus-wide initiatives in AI and related communities of practice.

UCSB is ranked among the top public universities in the United States, and the Department of Communication is also highly ranked in worldwide comparisons. UCSB is a designated Hispanic Serving Institution, and an Asian American and Native American Pacific Islander Serving Institution. It offers several programs to support incoming faculty, including housing assistance Faculty Housing | Campus Housing and various grant support programs.

Completed all requirements for a Ph.D. (or equivalent) in a Communication or related field except dissertation by the time of application.