Making AI Functional with Workarounds: An Insider's Account of Invisible Labour in Organisational Politics

TL;DR

This paper explores the hidden, politically charged work involved in implementing GenAI in higher education, emphasizing the importance of understanding invisible labour and workarounds as integral to sociotechnical integration.

Contribution

It provides an insider's autoethnographic account highlighting the sociotechnical friction and the role of workarounds in making GenAI functional within organizational politics.

Findings

Workarounds are central to sociotechnical integration of GenAI.

Invisible labour involves navigating organizational territoriality and power dynamics.

Workarounds can create shadow systems obscuring crucial sociotechnical efforts.

Abstract

Research on the implementation of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) in higher education often focuses on strategic goals, overlooking the hidden, and often politically charged, labour required to make it functional. This paper provides an insider's account of the sociotechnical friction that arises when an institutional goal of empowering non-technical staff conflicts with the technical limitations of enterprise Large Language Models (LLMs). Through analytic autoethnography, this study examines a GenAI project pushed to an impasse, focusing on a workaround developed to navigate not only technical constraints but also the combined challenge of organisational territoriality and assertions of positional power. Drawing upon Alter's (2014) theory of workarounds, the analysis interprets "articulation work" as a form of "invisible labour". By engaging with the Information Systems (IS) domains of user innovation and technology-in-practice, this study argues that such user-driven workarounds should be understood not as deviations, but as integral acts of sociotechnical integration. This integration, however, highlights the central paradoxes of modern GenAI where such workarounds for "unfinished" systems can simultaneously create unofficial "shadow" systems and obscure the crucial, yet invisible, sociotechnical labour involved. The findings suggest that the invisible labour required to integrate GenAI within complex organisational politics is an important, rather than peripheral, component of how it becomes functional in practice.