Katherine Stephen

Congratulations to Centre for Social Informatics PhD student Katherine Stephen on the acceptance of a paper that she submitted for presentation at the British Sociological Association Work, Employment and Society conference 2021.

Katherine’s paper is entitled Investigating cognitive adaptability in new workplace cultures with the Imitation Game. Its content is focused on deployment of the Imitation Game to determine workers’ application of cognitive adaptability when entering new workplace cultures. This technique, developed by Collins and Evans (2013)*, is a methodological formalisation of a parlour game to investigate expressions and expectations of tacit knowledge. When it is ‘played’, an expert judge is asked to determine which of two participants in a particular setting is an ‘outsider’. Katherine plans to use the Imitation Game in the empirical phase of her ESRC/Skills Development Scotland funded doctoral research on metaskills development in the workplace. She will deliver her presentation on the morning of the first day of the British Sociological Association Work, Employment and Society conference on Wednesday 25th August.

*Collins, H., & Evans, R. (2013). Quantifying the tacit: The imitation game and social fluency. Sociology, 48(1), 3-19.