Oxford Internet Institute

Professor Gina Neff is a Senior Research Fellow and Associate Professor at the Oxford Internet Institute and at the Department of Sociology, University of Oxford. She studies innovation, the digital transformation of industries, and how new technologies impact work.

She has published three books and over three dozen research articles on innovation and the impact of digital transformation. Her book Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries (MIT Press, 2012) about the rise of internet industries in New York City, won the 2013 American Sociological Association Communication and Information Technologies Best Book Award. Her book, Self-Tracking, co-authored with Dawn Nafus (MIT Press, 2016) focuses on the practices and politics of using consumer technologies to track health and other everyday personal metrics. Her ongoing project on large-scale building architecture and construction examines how new information and communication technologies require new ways of working and the challenges of implementing these changes at an industrial scale.

She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from Columbia University where she remains a faculty affiliate of the Center on Organizational Innovation. Professor Neff has held faculty appointments at the University of Washington and the University of California, San Diego. She has had fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study and the Center for Information Technology Policy. Her popular writing has appeared in Wired, The Atlantic, and Slate.

Areas of Interest for Doctoral Supervision

Big data, cultural industries, innovation, labour, social media, organisation

Research interests

innovation, work, organisations, culture, communication, theory, qualitative methods, critical data studies, science and technology studies.

Position held at the OII

• Director of DPhil programme, January 2017 –
• Senior Research Fellow, July 2016 –
• Associate Professor, July 2016 –