Ai Yu

Dr Ai Yu is an Associate Professor in Organisation Studies at the Southampton Business School, University of Southampton.

Research interests

• Gender, body and identity in work practices
• Power, ethics and accountability in organisational settings
• Ethnography
• Digital ethnography

Current research

Ai’s research covers two clustered themes: (1) gender, body and identity in the context of studying everyday work practices (job crafting, project work and temporary organising etc.); and (2) power, ethics, and accountability in the context of implementing technological change programmes (management control, social media, digital surveillance, etc.) in organisational or societal settings.

Her methodological expertise is in the field of ethnography and digital ethnography, which has allowed her to study real-life experiences and interactions from an embodied and affect-based perspective.

Her recent monograph, “Accountability as mourning: accounting for death in the time of COVID-19”, published in the journal ‘Accounting, Organization and Society’, examines the politics and ethics of accounting techniques and their implications for studying accountability in practice. The paper also provides important insights into the process of leading in a crisis situation where leaders of sovereign states are recommended to relate to one another in truly emancipatory ways.

Ai welcomes PhD applications in line with her research interests, especially for research projects that are problem-solving oriented and inter-disciplinary in nature.

Teaching

Ai leads an undergraduate module on Business Ethics at SBS and co-teaches Qualitative Research Methods for master students. Previously, she taught Organizational Behaviour, Knowledge and Project Management for ten years.