Human Resource (HR) departments have proven to be early adopters of emergent artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Due to the speed of organizational uptake, there is a gap in understanding how these tools affect structures, practices and personnel within Human Resource Management (HRM). Using three horizons framework methodology, the authors investigate how HRM is evolving to utilize the rapid advancement in technology. Firstly, the authors reflect back across 100 years of HRM history and how the functionality has changed as technological advancements have swept through HRM, broken into three categories; 1. Pre computer-age, 2. Computer-age, 3. AI-age, we assess how the functionality of HR has changed overtime and the trends which emerge, including increased information intensity, increased monitoring, increased self-service, and greater information integration. This analysis provides insights for extrapolation on future trends for the development of human-AI collaboration (HAIC) within HRM. Utilizing Singh & Sarkar’s (2022) HR metrics table and their impact on HR decisions, the authors further develop the responsibilities of each role within a HAIC. Our analysis identifies that the focus of HRM changed significantly between the pre computer-age to computer-age, but slowed as AI was introduced, instead seeing increasing efficiencies in the functionality and leaning towards strategic planning and decision-making as the primary focus. Ultimately, organizations need to strongly consider the advancements into AI to reduce costs and increase efficiency, all while keeping the human at the centre, including having a clear understanding of both the human and the technological elements of the collaboration.

The case records of Mary Ellen Richmond, a pioneer of social work, were already internationally recognised and disseminated at the beginning of the 20th century. She established legal and documentary criteria for providing services to the poor, disabled, and needy and contributed to the development of a structured social work profession. 100 years later, documentation in youth welfare offices, both the written planning of help for children and their families and the identification of potential child welfare risks, is supported by software. How have the different writing systems (Discourse networks, Kittler 1990), the increasing and changing formalisation and rationalisation associated with different technologies and practices, influenced writing? Against this background, how has the view of the child and ideas of professionalism changed since mid of the 20th century?
The lecture will analyse youth welfare records from six major cities (1950s to 2020s). It is part of the research project ‘Under Observation’; initial publications are available (cf. e.g. Streblow-Poser 2020, 2024). Using hermeneutic research methods, the intertwining of social and technological change will be analysed. In this way, it is possible to work out how technological development can lead to a change in social decisions.

Kittler, Friedrich (1990): Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900. Stanford.
Streblow-Poser (2020): Jugendamtliche Entscheidungsprozesse vor und nach den Heimkampagnen der 1970-er Jahre. In: Businger, S.; Biebricher, M. (ed.): Von der paternalistischen Fürsorge zu Partizipation und Agency. Zürich, 133-156.
Key words: welfare records, social work, computerisation
General topic: “Circulation” - material and immaterial histories of technology

Contemporary food habits are underpinned by expectations of year-round freshness, diversity and abundance, entailing complex journeys from farm to plate. Such expectations may be traced to the transformation of long-distance food trades following the late-nineteenth century advent of refrigeration or mechanical cold. This profoundly asserted new forms of settler colonial power throughout the Pacific, yet little attention has been paid to the application of cold within the colonial tropics, and the challenges and implications of emergent food interdependency in the region. This paper offers a point of entry to these broader transformations by centring the domestic refrigerator. It examines the appeal and influence of the home appliance in rural and tropical regions of Australia and across the island Pacific, areas remote from reliable or affordable electricity, as well as from accessible supplies of perishable foods produced elsewhere. In such locations the refrigerator was understood differently from urban kitchens and idealised notions of femininity, centering instead ideals of white settler self-sufficiency, masculine mastery of the environment, and notions of colonizing capacity.

This paper historicizes technological and natural resource development as pivotal practices of asserting sovereignty in the early twentieth century. It argues that a shared commitment to efficient resource exploitation underwrote competitions among imperial and anti-imperial engineers over the right to assert sovereignty over landscapes. It focuses on the French-Lebanese competition to build hydroelectric infrastructure on Lebanon’s largest river, the Litani. With the Ottoman empire’s collapse, the Litani became a contested borderland. During the subsequent period of French Mandate rule (1919–43), French imperialists, Zionist investors, and Lebanese engineers sought to claim rightful control over the Litani River basin by arguing that the river was flowing “wasted into the sea.” The League of Nations Mandate framework claimed that European imperial rule was a vehicle for technological modernization, epitomized by efficient resource management. But in practice, rather than pursuing efficient water use, the French Mandate state granted water resources to profit-seeking private monopolies. Lebanese engineers pointed to the Mandate’s waste of the Litani as evidence that the Lebanese nation must rightfully claim it. Constructing hydroelectric and irrigation infrastructure on the river would telegraph Lebanon’s sovereignty in international legal fora, build sovereignty as a fact on the ground, and secure that sovereignty by supporting economic self-determination. However, contestations over the definition of the national “self” complicated this agenda. Most communities in the Litani Basin rejected both France and the Lebanese nation, including by means of armed insurgency. Those contestations defined the emergence of the Litani project, the largest development project in Lebanese history.