Bio & CV
Melissa Mazmanian is a Professor of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, and Professor of Organization and Management at the Paul Merage School of Management (joint) at the University of California, Irvine.
Melissa’s interests revolve around technologies as used in-practice within organizational and personal contexts, specifically in relation to creative work, predictive systems, quantification practices, and the everyday lives of busy professionals. She has conducted a variety of ethnographic and qualitative research projects on the individual experience and social dynamics that emerge when people adapt to using new forms of communication, data manipulation, and GenerativeAI.
Her current work investigates Hollywood screenwriters and the practice of collaborative creative work in a fragmented and changing industry. Working with colleague Beth Bechky, Melissa has interviewed over 100 screenwriters and observed mock writers rooms in order to explore pressing questions about creative collaboration, occupational squeeze, and the threat and opportunities around predictive analytics and generative AI in film and television storytelling.
Her book (with colleague Christine Beckman), titled Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working, and Parenting in the Digital Age was published by Stanford University press in June, 2020. Based on in depth ethnographic research, Melissa and Christine explore how busy professionals and their families use communication technologies to enact myths of the Ideal Worker, Perfect Parent, and Cultivated Body and the structures of scaffolding they rely on to "do it all."
In addition, Melissa is interested in the intersection between formal power structures and everyday practices in organizations. In this vein she has been engaged in qualitative research on a variety of topics including: data integrity breakdown and rehabilitation in healthcare; cycles of “ground truthing” in Olympic athlete selection; the rituals of quantification that go into budgeting; coordination practices that are shaped by the introduction of electronic health systems; and smartphone use in work contexts.
Melissa has published in top management and STS journals such as Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, MIS Quarterly, Science Technology and Human Values, and ACM venues such as CHI and CSCW. She earned her PhD in Organization Studies from the MIT Sloan School of Management and Masters in Information Economics, Management and Policy from the University of Michigan, School of Information.
