Date and time: Thursday 4 June 2026, 13:00-14:00 CEST
Speaker: Professor Diane Burns, University of Sheffield
Title: From Policy to Practice: AI and the Future Organisation of Social Care
Where: Digital Futures hub, Osquars Backe 5, floor 2 at KTH main campus OR Zoom
Directions: https://www.digitalfutures.kth.se/contact/how-to-get-here/
OR
Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/69560887455
Host: Host Sanna Kuoppamäki, sannaku@kth.se
Bio: Dr Diane Burns is Professor in Organisation Studies, the Head of the Organisation Studies Research Cluster at Sheffield University Management School and a Co-Investigator of the ESRC Centre for Care at the University of Sheffield, UK. She holds a PhD in Organisational Psychology from the Manchester Metropolitan University and has been researching the organisation and management of older people’s care for nearly 20 years.
Dr. Burns is a Trustee of the British Academy’s Learning Society of Studies of Organizing for Healthcare and Organising Care, Labour and Employment Theme Lead for the Centre for International Research on Care, Labour and Equalities, Faculty of Social Science at the University of Sheffield. She has led numerous national research collaborations with partner universities and practice partners, contributing significantly to understandings of the connections between time, technology and business innovation and informing UK policydebates on innovation in social care and sustainable and digitally enabled caremodels.
Abstract: This talk explores how contemporary AI policy visions intersect with the long-standing organisational realities of social care, drawing on published research by Diane Burns and her colleagues, on care work in the UK since 2010. Building on ethnographic and organisational studies of institutional and home-based care settings, the talk situates AI not as a rupture, but as a new layer within existing systems of coordination, surveillance, task allocation, and professional judgement.
Using comparative analysis of national AI strategies in the UK, Finland, and Sweden, the seminar examines how policy imaginaries envisage AI reshaping care workflows, decision-making, and managerial control through tools such as algorithmic decision-support systems, monitoring technologies, and robotics. These visions are analysed in light of established findings on how care is actually organised in social care – where relational work, informal coordination, and professional discretion are central to care quality. The talk highlights critical implications for trust, autonomy, staff wellbeing, and dignity at work, arguing that lessons from social care-based research are essential for designing and governing AI that genuinely supports, rather than undermines, care practice.
