When new technologies arise, organizations face a tension between moving rapidly to capitalize on the promises of these technologies and taking time to grapple with the moral ambiguity these technologies create. Within organizations, occupational groups can have differing views regarding what should be prioritized and thus, may struggle to agree on shared practices. This paper develops theory about how challenger occupational groups influence the work of dominant occupational groups under dueling conditions of moral uncertainty and urgency and how these strategies may enable productive negotiations. Over a period of 18 months, we examined this phenomenon by observing a challenger occupation – ethicists – and a dominant occupation – clinical researchers involved in data collection – within a federally-funded science consortium engaged in creating a new biometric dataset for artificial intelligence-catalyzed health research. Facing systemic challenges in both time constraints and an ambiguous mandate to “ethically source” data, the occupational groups had differing, yet each valid, claims for why their preferred organizational practices would better lead to social progress. By analyzing persistent conflicts over ethical issues, we show how ethicists initiate what we refer to as “progress contests,” in which the ethicists deliberated, with researchers involved in data collection, organizational progress narratives and challenged the organization’s entrainment to an urgent pace, which in practice had limited opportunities for work to deviate from the dominant progress narratives. Through these deliberations, ethicists negotiated changes in some of the clinical researchers’ work, though the hotly contested nature of discussion degraded relationships. Our findings detail how occupations can differ in their conceptions of progress. Further, the findings suggest that, in some cases, challenger occupations may successfully influence the work practices of a dominant occupational group by challenging temporal structures that are rationalized around that group’s view of progress in order to create opportunities for negotiating the meaning of progress itself.
