Pictured: Ruilin Huang (center), Ella Hafermalz (second from left), main supervisor Frida Pemer (left), grading committee members Pernilla Bolander (third from left), Lukas Goretzki (second from right) and Jens Rennstam (right).

The challenge of control—the ways one party influences, regulates, and coordinates the behaviors of another to achieve organizational objectives—lies at the heart of all organizations. Autonomy, by contrast, is often seen as being in tension with control. Post-pandemic distributed work, widely associated with high autonomy, provides a particularly relevant context to examine this relationship. Ruilin’s dissertation explores these dynamics and reveals a shift in both the directions and targets of control in distributed work. It points to the emergence of bottom-up forms of control, where managers’ agendas are significantly shaped by employees’ requests for supervision, in addition to the conventional top-down or horizontal dynamics. He also identifies an outside-in control dynamic, in which non-work demands increasingly influence workplace practices, in contrast to the traditional inside-out view that work tends to encroach on personal life.

Acting as opponent during the defence was Associate Professor Ella Hafermalz (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam). Her research focuses on remote and hybrid work, especially in relation to emerging technologies. She engaged with Ruilin’s concepts, invited him to unpack the shifting nature of control, and explored its implications for the evolving landscape of work.

Ruilin will continue his academic journey as a postdoctoral researcher and plans to build on his work on autonomy, control, and work–nonwork boundaries to explore how Generative AI may reshape these dynamics. The Department of Management and Organization wishes him all the best in this next stage of his career!