題目：Robotic Bureaucracy: An Assessment of Burden Shift in University Research Administration Through Email Analysis
主講人：佐治亞理工學院經濟發展研究中心首席研究員 Jan Youtie教授
時間：5月10日（星期四）9:00-11:00
地點：主樓418
講座嘉賓簡介：
Jan Youtie教授是佐治亞理工學院經濟發展研究中心首席研究員，公共政策學院副教授，主要研究方向是新興技術評估、創新和知識的測量評估、基于科技的經濟發展、制造業競爭力。她是多個國際期刊的專門審稿人，先后主持和參與項目30余項，出版專著10本，發表學術論文30余篇，其文章“協調工業現代化服務：美國制造業拓展合伙關系的影響和分析”曾獲得美國Lang Rosen優秀論文金獎。
講座內容簡介：
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.
（承辦：管理工程系、科研與學術交流中心）
