Short Bio & CV
Melissa Mazmanian is a UCI Chancellor’s Fellow, 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. She currently serves as Department Chair of the Department of Informatics.
Melissa’s interests revolve around technologies as used in-practice within organizational and personal contexts, specifically in relation to creative work, quantification practices, and the nature of time in the digital age. 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 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 their 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 practices of budgeting, the introduction of electronic health systems, change efforts to promote predictable time off, and smartphone use in work contexts.
Melissa has published in Organization Science, Academy of Management Journal, MIS Quarterly 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.
