题目：Robotic Bureaucracy: An Assessment of Burden Shift in University Research Administration Through Email Analysis

　　主讲人：佐治亚理工学院经济发展研究中心首席研究员 Jan Youtie教授

　　时间：5月10日（星期四）9:00-11:00

　　地点：主楼418

　　讲座嘉宾简介：

　　Jan Youtie教授是佐治亚理工学院经济发展研究中心首席研究员，公共政策学院副教授，主要研究方向是新兴技术评估、创新和知识的测量评估、基于科技的经济发展、制造业竞争力。她是多个国际期刊的专门审稿人，先后主持和参与项目30余项，出版专著10本，发表学术论文30余篇，其文章“协调工业现代化服务：美国制造业拓展合伙关系的影响和分析”曾获得美国Lang Rosen优秀论文金奖。

　　讲座内容简介：

　　The expansion of university research regulations in the US has raised concerns about the cost and time burdens these regulations place on government funded university researchers (National Science Board, 2014). Into this conundrum has emerged the private sector, which provides software systems to automate university research grants administration including through automating sending of emails for reporting and compliance purposes to facilitate the ability of university researchers to comply with these government regulations. These systems, as much of information and communication technologies purport to do, are designed to enhance productivity, but, for whom? This paper examines the extent to which these systems result in a productivity paradox, producing a computer-enabled administrative burden shift to researchers. In addition to reporting results from 100 interviews with National Science Foundation research investigators, we will present the results of using a novel methodology based on a pilot analyses of emails. The emails are associated with a small grant received by the authors, including emails generated by the software system – which we term robotic emails – as well as those sent by human administrators, to examine the research administration burden topic. We explore the extent to which the systems, through their emails, can serve as an indicator of the transfer of administrative tasks to faculty to a greater extent than personally sent emails and if so, which administrative areas this transfer occurs. The results demonstrate that two-thirds of the emails sent upon project initiation are either robotic emails or emails that are needed to address issues raised by robotic emails. Moreover, this use of robotic emails is most prevalent in compliance and reporting areas and less involved with project initiation. Although this is a pilot study, it offers insights for similar studies in other domains of policy and administration about the use of data from systematized compliance requests or other mechanized administration technologies as a window into how these technologies may affect administrative burden.

　　（承办：管理工程系、科研与学术交流中心）