The Farmer and the "Good Cow": Implications of Emerging Technology for Knowledge, Performance, and Recognition in Expert Dairy Work
Year: 2026
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Across organizations and occupations, emerging technologies are reshaping expert work in ways that the literature has struggled to make sense of holistically. Research on expertise has developed along three largely separate tracks, treating expertise as knowledge held by individuals, as performance enacted for audiences, or as recognition conferred by others, and each has produced its own account of how technology disrupts expertise based on these ontological divides. However, these are only partial accounts of a larger phenomenon that is difficult to capture in one study. This dissertation attempts to do just that. I argue that knowing, performing, and recognizing are not competing definitions of expertise but component, interwoven constitutive processes within a unified ecological framework of expert work, and that technology, once it enters expert work, becomes endogenous to each of them and to the recursive loops that bind them together. I develop this argument through three qualitative field studies of expert work in the U.S. dairy industry, where farmers are navigating the rapid integration of robotic milkers, activity-tracking collars, genomic testing, predictive algorithms, and integrated data platforms into work that was historically organized around embodied judgment and “cow sense.” Drawing on participant observations of, and interviews with, seventy-four dairy workers and twelve large animal veterinarians in California across sixteen dairy farms, two calf ranches, and five large animal veterinary practices, I show how these three constitutive processes of expertise are recursive and interdependent. Study 1 examines knowing as a recursive process of representing an object of expertise in digital form. Findings show how digital systems rendered cows as four different evaluative objects – an inscription-compatible body, a biographical record, an algorithmic prediction, and a comparative position in a herd distribution – and how farmers’ ongoing congruence work to align digital and physical realities cumulatively reshaped both digital and physical objects over time. Study 2 examines performing as a recursive process of orienting towards technologies in ways that are informed by non-technological interactions. Findings show how farmers’ experiences of expertise threat from employers, peers, and subordinates became the interpretive lens through which the same technology was viewed either as a tool, a symbol, or a control mechanism. Study 3 examines recognizing as a recursive process of inferring expertise from digital traces of work. Findings show how digital visibility gave dairy veterinarians insights into farmers’ backstage activities that were not meant to be seen. Vets arrived at inferences about gaps in farmers’ knowledge, execution, or values, and calibrated interventions to fill these gaps while buffering their strategies to protect their working relationships with farmers. Read together, the three studies advance an integrated framework in which technology participates in expertise not by replacing knowledge, mediating performance, or shifting recognition criteria as discrete effects, but by entering the entangled relationships through which all three processes unfold. The dissertation contributes to scholarship on expertise by bridging long-standing ontological divisions across the field, and to scholarship on technology and organizing by specifying how technologies become endogenous to expert work in the densely relational, interdependent settings that characterize modern technologically saturated organizations.
Author: Shen, Roni
Institution: University of California, Santa Barbara
Language: English
Subfield: Management Information Systems
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213475677