Ella Hafermalz (KIN Center for Digital Innovation, member of the AI@Work research group) has been appointed to the editorial review boards of two leading academic journals: Organization Studies (OS) and the Journal of Information Technology (JIT). Both journals sit at the heart of the questions Hafermalz has spent years investigating.
Research: GenAI in creative and knowledge work
Hafermalz 's research explores how digital technologies reshape work and organizational practices.
In a study recently published in Academy of Management Discoveries, Hafermalz and her colleagues Marleen Huysman and Jana Retkowsky tracked how generative AI tools changed the workflow of creative professionals at every stage of production. The research introduces two key concepts: "process collapse", where brainstorming, visualization, and production compress into a single iterative loop, and GenAI as a "spirited technology" — powerful and generative, but unpredictable and in need of careful human direction.
In parallel, Hafermalz is working with Sybil Liu on how GenAI shifts time and attention in hermeneutic work — specifically, how historians selectively integrate AI into their research practices. And in earlier work based on interviews with 50 early ChatGPT adopters together with Jana Retkowsky and Marleen Huysman, she examined how employee-GenAI relationships evolve from private experimentation into an integral part of knowledge work.
Grant: EMANAIRE and the future of early-career work
This longitudinal, embedded approach continues in her most recent project. Together with Marleen Huysman, Hafermalz is part of EMANAIRE, a newly funded Marie Skłodowska-Curie Doctoral Network that will train 15 doctoral researchers across eight European countries to study how GenAI is reshaping organizational practices and the future of work. Their strand of the project centres on a pressing question: how can early-career professionals build experience when entry-level tasks are increasingly automated? The team will use embedded ethnographic research to study how GenAI reconfigures knowledge creation, sharing, and validation, and co-design practical interventions to support early-career development.
Contributing to the research community
Organization Studies and the Journal of Information Technology are among the most influential outlets in their respective fields. Joining their editorial review boards means contributing to the direction and quality of scholarship that shapes how the academic community understands organizations, technology, and the future of work. It is a role that calls for exactly the kind of expertise Hafermalz has built — bridging organizational theory and the lived realities of AI in practice. These appointments add to her existing role as Associate Editor at the European Journal of Information Systems, further cementing her position in these scholarly communities.
