MSCA Doctoral Position Balancing Individual AI-Augmentation Organisational Stability

Department of Sociology MSCA Doctoral Position on Balancing Individual AI-Augmentation with Organisational Stability 100 % Start of employment 1 January 2027, temporary

The Department of Sociology at the University of Zurich looks back on more than 60 years of active research and teaching. It is one of the leading empirically oriented institutes in Switzerland and Europe. The basic understanding is based on theory-driven empirical social research with a strong focus on quantitative methods.

EMANAIRE is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Doctoral Network bringing together 15 doctoral candidates at nine European universities to study how AI is changing work. Its projects examine what happens when generative and agentic AI enters leadership, everyday workflows, team communication, professional learning and career decisions. Across the network, human agency means the practical ability to understand AI-supported decisions, exercise judgement, question outputs and shape how work is organised.

Each researcher joins an international cohort, receives supervision across institutions and takes part in three residential schools, methods workshops, monthly research seminars and joint work with organisations beyond academia. Every project includes a planned six-month intersect oral secondment.

Employees often build personal prompt libraries, automations and AI agents before their organisation has agreed common rules. These tools can make an individual faster while creating problems for colleagues who must reproduce the work, review a decision or take over when someone leaves. This project will trace how personalised AI routines and shadow AI develop, and how they affect collaboration, oversight, handovers and organisational resilience.

You will compare bottom-up experimentation with formal roll-outs, paying attention to disclosure, trust, control, culture and power. The planned research combines longitudinal case evidence with observation, digital diaries, interviews and collaboration-network analysis. The final organisations, sample, integration of methods and data-governance arrangements will be confirmed with the supervision team. The doctorate will explain how organisations can accommodate useful individual experimentation while maintaining collective continuity.

It should identify when personal digital infrastructures become difficult to audit or transfer, and which safeguards help. Expected practical outputs include guidance on disclosure norms, versioning, audit trails and workflow portability, grounded in evidence about how employees actually use AI over time.

• Examine through qualitative methods how workers build personalised routines around agentic and generative AI and how these routines affect collaboration, oversight and resilience.
• Compare bottom-up experimentation and shadow AI with formal top-down rollout.
• Combine longitudinal cases, observation, digital diaries, interviews and collaboration-network analysis.
• Develop a framework and practical guidance on disclosure, versioning, audit trails, handovers and workflow portability.
• Refine the research questions and design with the supervision team and prepare ethics, data-management and open-science materials.
• Complete a doctoral thesis and related research outputs under the host doctoral programme and EMANAIRE plan.
• Take part in local and network-wide training, cohort activities, reviews, dissemination and practitioner engagement.
• Undertake the six-month intersect oral secondment and the separate academic mobility visit.
• Contribute to research integrity, equality, responsible AI, open science and FAIR data practices.
• Complete at least 20 ECTS credits of structured doctoral training, including at least 10 ECTS credits through network-wide provision. EMANAIRE combines local doctoral courses with three residential schools, monthly paper-development seminars, work-package workshops and network reviews.

A Personal Career Development Plan will be agreed within the first three months and reviewed every six months.

Applicants should hold, or be close to completing by the start date, a relevant master's degree or equivalent and demonstrate the potential to undertake independent doctoral research. Research, policy or industry experience relevant to the project is advantageous.

• Interest in digital sociology, work, shadow IT or AI, organisational resilience or technology governance.
• Experience or training in qualitative research and interest in mixed-methods integration.
• Ability to examine organisational culture, power, disclosure and control with analytical sensitivity.

Excellent English language skills, both written and spoken, are essential.

Applicants may be of any nationality. To be eligible for MSCA funding, the selected candidate must, on the first day of MSCA employment:
(i) not hold a doctoral degree; candidates who have successfully defended a doctoral thesis but have…