Artificial Intelligence at Work: An Integrative Perspective on the Impact of AI on Workplace Inequality

The nexus between technology and workplace inequality has long been a focal point of scholarly discourse, now heightened by the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence (AI). Our review moves beyond dystopian/utopian views of AI by identifying four perspectives— normative, cognitive, structural, and relational— espoused by scholars examining the impact of AI on workplace inequality. Our review surfaces the respective strengths, limitations, and underlying assumptions of these perspectives and highlights how each perspective speaks to a particular facet of workplace inequality, either encoded, evaluative, wage, or relational inequality. A key insight from our review is that integrating these four perspectives would enable a stronger understanding of how, when, and in what direction AI can impact workplace inequality. Toward that end, we provide an integrative framework that espouses a “lifecycle approach” to examine AI technology development, deployment, and use as an ongoing, iterative process, as opposed to studying them in isolation. Our framework foregrounds the role of normative ideologies, materiality, cognitive frames, and organizational structures/processes that together impact workplace inequality in the wake of AI. Our integrative review seeks to equip and motivate management and organizational scholars to examine the lifecycle of AI and its multifaceted impact on workplace inequality.